work went really well today, which would’ve been nice to maintain. iplowed through the first half of a draft for an article for robis – something about the importance of integrating a web site into a complete marketing/identity plan. David seemed tickled pink by it all.
the iMac is in – tomorrow we’ll pick it up and start the long road towards software installs. tim kennett called out of the blue today after a vaguely uncertain sounding email. dave callerID’d him and answered, “Tim Kennet’s line.” there was a pause and then suppressed laughter as he was obviously explaining to Tim what he’d done. after he got off he laughed uproariously for a minute or so. he enjoyed it way too much.
tim, it seems, is coming to work with us wednesday and is very excited about the job. “Well.” I laughed. “looks like he finally decided…” he nodded to me. “You know, Jeff… this means you only have twenty-four hours to decide if you can live without that scanner and use the iMac…” i found myself working out possible ways to shuffle and sling files over ethernet, pondering scanner-sharing software, and gnashing my teeth over the lack of iMac USB peripherals.
we visited the office space.
we pulled up to the office in the rain and bolted to the door, covering our heads with papers while other pedestrians used their umbrellas. inside, gave the stairway to the second floor a double-take. wide and grey-carpeted, it was washed in natural light by a skylight; nothing like the other claustrophobic bricked-in spaces i had seen before. I shared a look with Dave and he grinned.
“I’m liking it already. This is gorgeous, very classy, very modern.”
inside, the office was a disaster. a disaster with potential.
magazines were piled on the maroon carpeting, and a copy of The Mosquito Coast with the back cover ripped off was lying open against the wall. a coffee table, sans couch, crouched in the middle of the floor without a place to go. “Hey!” a voice said. “Sorry, just tryin’ to find a label on this desk or something.” To the left of the doar floated a huge horseshoe of a wooden desk; the studry blond guy squatting underneath it, i guessed, was Jerry.
He stood, swallowed my hand in a friendly grip, and rolled his eyes. “Still trying to find where Bill rented this stuff from, he took all the stuff he bought but left the rental furniture. Hey Dave.”
i looked around whiile they talked, catching snatches of phrases about damned lawyers and six-months-behind-rent. In the far wall, a bay window craned out over the sidewalk, with a full view of front street and the train station. if i wanted to, i could watch every person who came near the building – a people watcher’s dream. or a sniper’s. leave it to my mind to make the connection. “William Kasey, Attourney At Law” was still stenciled into the windows. We’d have to get rid of that.
“So, what happened with this guy?” Dave asked Jerry conversationally. Nothing prying, just a friendly wondering. “I mean, when will he be back to pick up his stuff?”
“Oh, I’ll find out where he got the furniture from, dont’ worry, we can stick it in one of the other offices if it gets to that,” he dismissed quickly, still looking around for hidden stickers or property marks.
Dave joined him in the search and I drifted over to catch more of their conversation. The room was deceptively large; we could fit a good three or four people in there if we really needed to. that boat of a desk just made it look smaller.
“No, I’m not worried about the desk, we can just keep that in here and Jeff can use it until we figure out what to do with it; I was just worried about what to do with his… well, his stuff. Law books, all that.” Dave waved at the stacks. In the shelft by the bay window, stacks of inches-thick tomes were collecting dust. “He just left it all here.”
“Oh. That.” Jerry stopped for a minute, standing up and scratching his chin dramatically. “I mean… I’ve got calls in to him.” He flashed a what-can-you-do? look and shrugged. “He’s hiding, it’s pretty obvious. I called his old number, his parents are living there now. They say they don’t know where to reach him. I mean, it’s in his court.” He laughed. “God, I’m glad you’re not lawyers.” A dramatic raising of his hands and his gaze to the heavens. “Thank /god/! No more lawyers!”
He and Dave laughed, and I kicked aside a few law journals to see the brick wall.
Jerry was animated, but not obnoxiously so. He rushed through his words, fast-talking like there was something on the other side of them that he wanted to get to before it got away. A ready grin and the haze of tobacco hung around him. chain-smoker. He took us back through the skinny hallway to his office, an affair a bit larger than the back seat of dave’s station wagon.
“Hold on, I can bring up the numbers for the utilities; it’s been fine the last few years except those guys–” another evil look to The Lawyers-- “want to run the air at seventy, twenty-four seven.” He groused, hammered at the keyboard, and cleared away an arc on his desk with a quick sweeping motion. post-its fluttered to the ground.
One wall was covered by a map of the chicago burbs, spiked with hundreds of colored pins. On the other, a wallful of framed quotations stretched from floor to ceiling. “Anyone can be tricked into an impossible deadling. No one can be bullied into meeting to it.” Murphys’ Laws of project management, immortalized individually.
“Got it.” I glanced back at him.
his desk is pitted and grooved. a wooden frog crouches on the tiny coffee table, and his telephone is an ancient handset with a bell-ringer. it’s deafening and i wonder how he can ignore it. after showing us the numbers he pulls open his drawer; half-spent boxes of KOOL fall out. he catches one and pulls a cigarette out. “Ah, fuck it. I’m gonna go have a smoke.”