Stop the Presses column by Chris Graham
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I’m supposed to write a press release about how we’ve moved into a new office.
Ahem. Here goes.
We’ve moved into a new office.
Zzzzzzz ….
Sorry ’bout that. I haven’t been getting much rest lately.
Did I mention that the new office is also the new home?
I didn’t?
Well …
“We pretty much live at work anyway. This just makes it official,” I told somebody, explaining the decision to move into a house in Downtown Waynesboro that is zoned for mixed-use development.
I’m sitting in an office on the first floor typing this column – directly over my head is our spare bedroom that my 2-year-old niece, Carly, has now decided is going to be her bedroom.
“These are my toys,” she said over the weekend during the move-in, gesturing toward the million or so stuffed animals that line the walls.
Every time I move, I say it’s going to be the last time. Now I mean it.
Have you ever had to move a home and an office in a weekend?
No?
I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy – and that was before the Drought of 2007 broke on Friday, aka We’re Moving Everything Big Day.
“Are you still going to move in the rain?” my mother-in-law asked my wife as we made our way toward the now-former Palatial Graham Estate south of Grottoes.
“Er …”
The answer was yes – because come hell or high water, I had decided weeks ago, Friday was to be the day for the big move.
Hell might have been preferable to having to move on a day that saw more than two inches of rain fall in the afternoon hours, but hey …
The bad part to it – well, one of the zillion – was that we didn’t have hot water in the house all weekend because the gas company was the one utility that we couldn’t get to come out before the move to do what they needed to do to get us online.
OK, speaking of the word online, there was that other company that shall remain nameless – mainly because the missus doesn’t like me to say bad things about people.
These are the people who are responsible for our Internet service – and who were at the home office on Friday to install said service.
And left here Friday evening having told us that they had installed the service.
But who had not – and despite us calling them on Sunday to let them know of this development, and that we are an Internet-based business that thus might need to have a handy connection to the Internet as soon as it was possible to get one working, didn’t send anybody on Monday to correct the problem, and in fact wasn’t able to get anybody out to us until noon Tuesday.
As I pen this column, in fact, I still don’t have Internet – which rather stinks, you know, given what I do for a living.
(If you are reading this, that means that they finally got it up and going. Or that we told them to go to hell and signed on with a rival ISP. That was actually my first choice, but …)
Other than the Internet, things went pretty smoothly with the move. I’d say 98 percent of the stuff that we boxed up and moved in is now out of the boxes and where it is supposed to go, which is remarkable considering.
And tonight, I’m hoping to get a minute or two of slumber.
If I can make it that …
Zzzz ….
Chris Graham is the author of Stop the Presses: A Collection of Columns. More information at www.authorchrisgraham.com.
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