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a little outside my territory
Monday, October 9 2000
Even after the weekend, it's still difficult to get up to speed on leading development of the UK site. It's totally different sort of work, more managerial and decidedly less fun than what I've been doing for the past six months. I feel like this new job has been unceremoniously dumped on me. Perhaps this is some sort of test, but I'm actually tempted to start looking for another job. My feelings on this issue intensified today as I looked over resumés and saw what these contractors I'm hiring are making. Lesson learned: don't ever give an underpaid code monkey the job of hiring people.
In the evening, my housemate John and I walked up to Rubios on Wilshire to use some free fish taco coupons he had. There were puddles of unspeakable muck on the sidewalk outside that we had to carefully avoid. The fish tacos were a welcome relief from my usual diet, which has largely been comprised of either sandwiches or corn chips with black beans.
After stopping at Ralph's to pick up food staples and flu medicine for John's sister, we walked back east, past the unspeakable muck outside Rubios, all the way to Federal Street (which lies several blocks outside the territory I confiscated in yesterday's entry). Then we turned south and eventually entered a courtyard-cored apartment complex on Rochester, the place where John's sister lives. She was on a couch, covered with blankets and convalescing from some sort of temporary illness. Surprisingly, she was in much more of an outgoing mood than I've come to expect (normally she's cranky and sort of a bitch). Her housemate Jen cheerfully announced a pumpkin-carving party as we were leaving. (Jen, John quickly informed me, is something of an over-involved premature grandmother type.)
As we walked back to Barrington (the eastern frontier of my territory), we came upon a discarded scrap of paper. "DSL is here!" it announced in that infuriating marketing-speak familiar from Earthlink's distinctive overpackaging. "Right!" John sneered. He's been making fun of DSL and its seeming inability to arrive ever since he moved in.
John and I eventually went to our favorite coffee shop, the nameless Café on the corner of Rochester and Centinela, where we had our usual: a cup of coffee for me and a cup of green tea for John (which he usually refills with water and honey multiple times). By comparison with other nights, the Café was hopping tonight. I'd venture to say that this was a direct result of the personality of the chick running the counter. She was unusually charismatic in a hip, big-boned sort of way. I suggested to John that nights at the Café are similar to radio shows hosted by different people. Some are popular and some, well, run at three AM on a Tuesday morning for a reason. When we weren't talking about the scene, John and I were talking shop about databases. Somewhat surprisingly, he's already picked up most of the buzzwords necessary to discuss relational schemas intelligently.
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