Kiribako

The End Of Olsson's

It’s strange to work in a place for 21 years and have it suddenly evaporate - But I can’t really say I was caught by surprise…

The past few days have reminded me a little of when I drove through Texas last summer: I saw a lot, but didn’t get to take my time and record my observations. When work has that kind of urgency, my quality of life suffers dearly. I have had the exhilaration of pushing myself to the limit on tasks I knew couldn’t be redone later. But it also left me with the lingering illness often associated with stress. In addition, I was humping a lot of baggage home, which sometimes left me exhausted.

Not that it was all pushing myself to the limit… What made it worse was the down-time; the frustrations; the planning for a future that backfired in the end. I would have loved to go out with a whimper. The reality was different.

Sunday there was a meeting of all the department managers. I was ready to work a normal Sunday - and if I sat around not preparing for the future, I could just hasten the end. But, then it turned out that I couldn’t hasten the end after all: It had already been decided. I was even placing book orders on Sunday morning(!). It’s a delicate maneuver, sharing information with just a select few, while keeping it secret. I couldn’t even tell my friends and family, lest it somehow get back to me - that made me decidedly unwilling to talk to anybody if I didn’t have to.

By Monday, all I could concentrate on was making sure not to leave any of my possessions - I was going to have to make several trips, and I didn’t have that many days in which to do it. I’d been turning my office into a home away from home, and I uncovered things I didn’t even remember I had. I discovered many items of value that were not company property at all, but supplies purchased by and for the collective - mostly people who were long gone. It was at about this point that the Airport store called with a computer problem. It was really the communications link failing. Then, as people arrived at the other stores, three more links failed. It only added insult to injury: I couldn’t believe the common-mode failure was a coincidence. The theory I didn’t want to believe was: Verizon didn’t really postpone the leased-circuit move. They must have picked that day to knock out the lines we would stop using after we moved the computer to Dupont Circle. And, the worst part was that it took them nearly 12 hours to resolve one of the four circuits. I never even bothered with the others. Not my problem anymore.

We got paychecks and (most of us) had to go cash them at a different bank - where they have the payroll account. Next, I mailed a big box of free reading copies to a friend in need of books, then I shuttled some stuff home. I didn’t work all that hard Monday - but that was just the calm before the storm. Frustrations, as I said before. When I was back for round two, I started working on website alterations. In the meeting Sunday, one of the General Managers handed out the flyers to post on the door Tuesday telling everybody we were closed for good. There was a note about going to the web site to leave comments - ‘testimonials’. I had a moment of panic - “Nobody asked me if this was feasible!” But, calm down, Evan… The solution took shape in my mind so fast that I knew immediately how to do it. It’s one of those moments where just a mere word changes everything, and you realize that it hadn’t occurred to you before because the situation had changed in the interval. I came back Monday afternoon to set it up…

In September 2006 - it’s nearly two years to the day - we had to migrate the whole site to Network Solutions. It’s a story I’ve told here before. On the old host, there was no blogging option that I knew of (lack of control on my part probably played a role), so I went with what I knew: Blogger. That worked all right until I started having absurd difficulty publishing posts. At the peak of it I had six or seven people writing on separate blogs, and if there was trouble all abound, it could take days to get everybody straightened out. I was threatening to move everybody over to Wordpress - the system available on the Network Solutions host. It never happened because it would have required tedious copying post by post, and I also didn’t see a way to fake the time stamps so that I could reflect the real times old posts were written. Well, none of that mattered for this project. I just needed one post page with the comments turned on, and we would never need to manage posting again. I thought it would me much easier than it was: I picked a wood-grain design template that reminded me of all our wooden shop fixtures - a visual break with the look of the site so far - then I inserted filler text and put it away for the night. I was even home in time to watch Terminator at 8.

But by 9:30, I was passed out. I heard the phone ring, and knew if must be Marina calling me from Texas, but I wasn’t able to move quickly, and I rationalized my failure with the sure knowledge that I would not have the stamina to stay awake for an entire conversation.

I inherited the espresso maker - I was the only one who ever used it regularly. It’s small and sturdy, something that has paid for itself already and would actually fit in my kitchen. People assumed it would be really heavy, but some of that is the water tank. I wasn’t carrying the water home. We could consider it as payment in kind for Tuesday, which would never go on a paycheck, and which turned out to be my most excellent deadline ever. For some reason, I thought I’d be able to roll home around noon. Once again, I had to sit idle, waiting for content contributions - and exploring how to pack everything I still wanted to take home. So the real job only got underway after two. I had a major kung-fu session, rapidly navigating the admin interface for a blog tool I had never attempted to use before (Wordpress), learning the relationships among the stylesheets and template files on the fly, with an audience looking over my shoulder - an audience very picky about print-quality fonts and fractional line spacing aesthetics. By 4pm and after they brought me a sandwich, I had the thing largely tamed - the sidebar cruft had to be removed with no real navigation or outbound links intended. Not exactly brain surgery, but make one wrong move and you may never figure out exactly what you damaged. (And, I remember vividly how my Marketing Director was reluctant to learn simple HTML editing because it was so easy to break the code…) Firefox and the developer tools I had installed came in handy: I love the “outline current element” feature, but I learned how effective it could be in showing my non-technical audience the spatial extent of tags. CSS editing on the browser window always seemed like a great idea too, but the sheer speed I could attain with it today was liberating.

It also made my eyes hurt. And my stomach a bit queasy. Or, was that the sandwich?

After wrapping up, I got a ride from one of the Arlington crew. He said a whole group was meeting for drinks at Lucky Bar in Dupont Circle. I didn’t want to shun the group - many of whom didn’t know me well, but I had to fight that queasy stress-induced feeling all night. It wasn’t until I was home a couple hours ago that the knot in my stomach finally started to unwind.

But now, I’m zipping along on a still-frazzled energy. And, I wish I could get some sleep. I still have to decide what to do with the rest of my life. And if there are any other desirable formats for that life I just haven’t discovered yet. When I wake up, I’ll have to run out for a bag of espresso beans and get the machine set up. It’s usually a good idea to run it at least once a day.

Hey, don’t forget to check out the slow evolution of the Olsson’s website on the Wayback Machine…

Posted by Evan Bittner Wed, 01 Oct 2008 05:09:00 GMT