The Deal

Okay, as I mentioned, a lot is up right now.  One of the big things is that my work geography is about to get very complex and very simple.  Let me try to explain.

I was essentially offered my old job in New York, with a couple of differences.  One is that I won’t work in New York – I will be working from home.  The other is that this company got bought by a much larger company last year, which means the whole playing field has changed.  But things will be simple in the sense that instead of spending roughly three hours a day commuting, I will spend roughly fifteen seconds walking down the stairs.  The complicated part is that I will be working for a company in Palo Alto as a California employee, but I will be working with a team that’s in my old digs in New York, but who also has a chunk of employees in Boston.  So the “where do you work” question technically has at least four answers.

And although I am in the Pacific time zone, I will be working Eastern time.  This isn’t a big deal for me; at the time I usually get ready to hop in my car and battle the 880, I will sit down at the computer and start working.  The real win is that I can wrap things up early in the afternoon and have a couple of hours to write and deal with various domestic duties which may or may not include Call of Duty.

As always, I’m sort of weird about discussing my work here, so no more details, although it’s not terribly hard to figure out.

The weird part of all of this is leaving Silicon Valley.  I mean, I technically won’t – I still have an office in Palo Alto, and I can still drive an hour or two and hang out there.  But I won’t be day-to-day down there.  It’s odd to think I’ve been doing this daily drive for two years now, and I’m still not that familiar with the area.  But I do love to see the big futuristic buildings, the chrome and glass towers and campuses that belong to companies that everyone has heard of, or to companies nobody even knows yet.  And then there’s the strip malls and rows of buildings that looked futuristic back in 1982, and now look like a beaten, middle-aged hooker, but are still rented out at a premium.  I wish I could quantify this architecture more, start a site about it, take lots of pictures of rustic earthtone trim and solid wood faceplates and old buildings labelscarred with removed SGI or DataGeneral logos.  But now that I’m not down there every day, that’s another project pushed to a deep back burner for now.

I now have a million other projects, including crap like where I will fit another computer, how I will run a new KVM, what ethernet hub or switch or other crap I will need to add to the home network, and how I will keep the cats away from me while I work.  And I’m fighting a low-grade cold, which will hopefully pass in another day or two.

But first, I get to go sit in the parking lot officially known as the Nimitz freeway for the next hour or two.  I better enjoy it while it lasts.