Movin' On Up

Due to the overwhelming volume of emails I received after not posting last Friday night, I suppose I can ‘fess up to what I was doing. (Sure, most of the emails were the usual spam, but I think it adds drama to the post. No?)

I was moving. Normally I come home and lay perfectly still, but I decided to incorporate motion into my evening. That was a joke. Get it? Moving? Nevermind.

It wasn’t my home abode that I was moving, but my office. Well, all the contents of my office since moving the physical office would be rather inefficient as well as leave a conspicuous gap in the old building structure. It would also be rather rude seeing as the new management company built out a new space for us.

Due to my meticulous planning (or rather following the meticulous notes from the girl that set up the last move) it was rather uneventful, although I did meet a guy that knew my dad better than I do. Apparently he’s still alive, loves to golf and hasn’t retired yet.

My new office overlooks the top level of a garage in downtown Chicago. Yep, you need to be a bigshot to get view like that. Not like those putzes that have to stare at the boring water of Lake Michigan or the boring old skyline. I was out of the office Monday, but on Tuesday I didn’t get a whole lot of work done because I was fascinated by the parking operations.

You see, when I get to work it looks like this:

By late morning it fills up and looks like this, and the fun begins:

They send a couple valet guys up there and start double parking the cars, turning the top level into a giant game of Tetris that gets increasingly complex, especially when people who are blocked in decide they want to leave in their own car.

I figured I would never get anything done, eventually design a new and improved parking algorithm on the back of a Jimmy John’s napkin, build my own garage, franchise, and soon become America's Urban Parking King and find myself on the cover of Forbes magazine in an expensive suit and a reflective vest passing out valet tickets with a big smile on my face in an obviously staged photo shoot. Unfortunately, I lost interest by Wednesday and went back to my quest to retire early by misappropriating company assets to make illegal copies of The Moosewood Restaurant Cookbook that I can sell under the cover of my caricature booth at flea markets around the Midwest.

It’s just crazy enough to work.