The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Commuter

Someday, I’m going to look back and think “was my commute in 2016 really that bad?” And, since it is that bad, I’m writing this to remind future me. 


(If you’re not future me, you have no reason to read this -- which is why I’m burying it in the middle of a Saturday night.)

My current commute has the amazing property of being worse in every aspect that what came before, viz.:

Departure Time

• Hoboken: 6:20 or 6:25 most days. 6:30 if I was pushing it.


• Third Avenue: No later than 6:15, and usually earlier.



Drive

• Hoboken: 5.5 miles on quiet back roads, with one traffic light. Total time consistently 11 minutes.


• Third Avenue: 12.5 miles out (13.5 miles back, with the U-turn) on highways. Eight traffic lights. Unforgiving traffic. Lots of speeding up and slowing down; lots of wasted gas. Time usually 16-19 minutes, unless there’s a backup. (Shorter in summer; longer in winter.)

Train Station Parking

• Hoboken: Flat, free lot. Parked in the same very close spot almost always. Out of my car and right to grade-level tracks fifteen feet away.
• Third Avenue: Large multi-level parking garage, which costs $3 a day. Garage mostly full of college-students’ cars, so it’s packed even at 6:30. Takes several minutes to find a spot up on the 5th or 6th levels, and longer to walk downstairs, across the pedestrian bridge, and down to track level. Getting out at night is slow and the ticket machines have broken several times already.



Train Ride

• Hoboken: Rarely too crowded. One-seat ride. Delays were exceptionally rare. About 50 minutes.


• Third Avenue: Generally crowded, and regularly packed by the time we head into NYC. One-seat ride. Delays were not uncommon, though reasonable given how old the tunnels and signals were. Scheduled to take just less than an hour, usually was about 1:05.

 

Final Approach to Office

• Hoboken: Five-minute walk on waterfront. Occasional inclement weather.


• Third Avenue: Either a 30-minute walk or a 15-20 minute ride on two subways. (Latter costs $2.75, each way.) In bad weather, the walking portion from subway to office building is still 4-5 times as long as the whole walk in Hoboken.



Arrival Time

• Hoboken: Consistently at 7:45. Total elapsed time about 1:20.
• Third Avenue: Occasionally as early at 8:00 (with a quick subway connection) but often as late as 8:20. Total average elapsed time 1:55.

The return journey is pretty much the same -- only, obviously, in reverse. Each leg of the commute is a bit more than a half-hour longer, and the working day itself is a full hour longer, which means an increase of 2+ hours every single day. (Just looking at working hours, I’ve estimated that the lower number of PTO days and the longer days mean I’m now working about 311 more hours in a year.)

So, yes, I’m tired all the time. And I do know why. Here’s hoping you (meaning future me, the only person who cares about these minutiae) have it better.

Don't You Know There Ain't No Devil; That's Just God When He's Drunk

Two and a half years ago, I grumped about my commute, which had gotten extended by the combined force of Hurricane Sandy and the human stupidity that parked most of NJ Transit's rolling stock in exactly the low point their own standards said they weren't supposed to.

Little did I know I had nothing to complain about, then.

(TL; DR version of old post: commute was about 65 minutes, each way, before hurricane, 90 afterwards.)

But these days, this is my life:

Morning:
Leave home at 6:20 to catch a 6:45 train at Montclair State University (further away, +$3 to park every day)
Walk from Penn Station to my office on the other end, arriving somewhere between 8:10 and 8:20.

Evening:
Walk out of the office at 6:00 for a 6:41 train that gets me home right at 8:00 if I'm lucky.

That's a two-hour commute, roughly, each way, and a day that runs about fourteen hours. At its very worst, the day in Hoboken saw me leave my house at 6:30 AM and get home at 5:50 PM. I am now very jealous of my prior self.

The Devil Is a Railroad Car

Every so often, I post things here mostly as a record, in case I wonder about them later. This is one of those occasions, so be warned.

Before Sandy, last year's major East Coast hurricane (not to be confused with Irene, the year before last's major East Coast hurricane), my train schedule looked like this:

Morning:
depart Lincoln Park 7:03, arrive Hoboken 7:55 (52 minutes)
Evening:
depart Hoboken 4:27, arrive Lincoln Park 5:20 (53 minutes)

And the world was bright and gay and happy.

After things settled down, more or less, after the storm, this is what I got:

Morning:
depart Lincoln Park 6:56, arrive Hoboken 8:05 (69 minutes)
Evening:
depart Hoboken 4:26, arrive Lincoln Park 5:25 (59 minutes)

There's finally a new official train schedule -- everything else since the storm has been PDFs printed off the website, not the usual printed booklet -- starting on Monday, with the following itinerary:

Morning:
depart Lincoln Park 6:51, arrive Hoboken 7:55 (64 minutes)
Evening:
depart Hoboken 4:30, arrive Lincoln Park 5:33 (63 minutes)

The time actually on the train is roughly a wash -- 127 minutes instead of 128 -- though that's still twenty minutes longer than it was six months ago. But the total length of day keeps growing, with a train now twelve minutes earlier in the morning and thirteen minutes later in the evening.

On the bright side, I do get an extra ten minutes a day to spend in the office, and three minutes more than I used to have back in the good 'ol days.

Update, Mid-March 2014:

The times have kept slipping, though the actual on-train time is shortening a bit. But the morning train moves a few minutes earlier each new schedule, and this is what it looks like now:

Morning:
depart Lincoln Park 6:45, arrive Hoboken 7:40 (55 minutes)
Evening:
depart Hoboken 4:30, arrive Lincoln Park 5:32 (62 minutes)

The next later train in the morning has not budged earlier, of course -- if it moved up as much as my train did, it would now be in pretty much exactly the same time as my pre-Sandy train -- nor has the afternoon train.

And so now I can get into the office about quarter of 8, most days, which is good for some things, he said brightly.

Like a Hurricane

To make this short and sweet: the Wheeler household came through Hurricane Sandy vastly better than we got through Hurricane Irene last year. The basement is still bone-dry (even after we took almost everything out of it Sat/Sun), and we only lost power for a few hours Monday night.

In fact, if I can believe the newspaper, we're now -- for the first time in our lives -- part of the 1%, since JCP&L, our electricity company, says that 99% of their customers are down right now.

I'm actually getting more work done at home this week than I expected -- I don't have access to a lot of my company's systems, so I can only do some things, but I'm trying to power through as many of those as I can.

Much of the rest of New Jersey is a huge mess, though -- even up in my area, where we didn't flood this time, there are plenty of big trees down and other problems. (And I have no idea when Hoboken will be un-flooded enough for me to actually go to the office and get some desperately needed stuff done before my looming vacation.)

But, if there's anyone out there worried about me, don't. Worry about those other people, like the ones in Little Ferry who got walloped when a tidal surge took out levees in the Meadowlands and swamped the first floors of their houses in minutes. Or most of the Shore, too. They've got it tough this time around.

Why I Am Not a Hollywood Mogul

Because I am befuddled that this song -- Fountains of Wayne's cover of the Kinks tune "Better Things" -- hasn't been used as the end-credits anthem of any movie yet.

I may have already made this point once, but it bears making again -- this song is perfectly crafted for such a use, and that lack is glaring. C'mon, Hollywood, get it together!

My Alarmingly Large and Increasingly Grown-Up Son

My older son -- whom I'm still calling Thing 1 for the purposes of this blog, though I probably should ask him if I should use his name or some other alias at this point -- is currently at his Eighth Grade Dance as I type. He got all gussied up -- wearing a shirt of mine, an old blazer of mine, and an "eight-bit" tie of his very own that was a Christmas present -- and was dropped off at his school by The Wife an hour or so ago.

That's him right there, looking startlingly mature and serious, and I only hope he's not breaking too many hearts at the dance this evening.

On the other hand, I remember my own Eighth Grade Dance, back far too long ago to be precise, and how the one thing I really participated in was an air guitar competition. I pinwheeled so vigorously that my glasses flew off of my face. Repeatedly. I was not then smart enough to simply fold the things up and put them in a pocket, or perhaps not willing to be that blind. Still, I'm pretty sure my son won't do anything quite that dumb this evening. Or maybe I mean that he won't tell me if he does anything that dumb, which is close enough.

Different Kinds of Math

I live in a small town, barely over 10,000 people and around 3 square miles. And yet, out of the 566 municipalities in New Jersey, it has a larger population than 60% of its neighbors -- we're #221.

This is so glaringly obviously the major problem with the cost of government in Jersey that everyone tries not to talk about it, to avoid embarrassment.

Because the obvious solution -- move most services to county-level government, since clearly our state is too gigantic and vast to run police, fire, and school organizations directly [1] -- would involve all of us nice suburbanites being plopped into the same system with "those people" in the larger cities.

I'm pretty sure most cost-of-government issues have similar solutions: clear, obvious, and impossible due to the people involved.


[1] Just in case it's unclear to some of my newer readers, I am being so sarcastic with this phrase that I am surprised the entire Internet does not burst into flames.

Parenting: Harder Once You Actually Do It

I was a much quirkier parent before I had kids. The Wife and I had all sorts of schemes and plans for the kids we thought we'd eventually have, and none of them actually happened. It turns out that when you're chasing around an actual screaming toddler, all of the amusing plans you made five years before aren't as funny.

Our big punishment was going to be making the kids Amish. Bad behavior? "You're Amish for the week, kid! No electricity, and no rides in the car." We never quite committed to actually buying a full set of shaming clothes for the prospective children -- though we vacationed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania pretty much every year, so it would have been easy to pick up a bonnet and calico dress -- but we were sure that we'd be turning off their electricity and sending them to school on one of those '30s-style apple-carton scooters whenever necessary.

That never happened, of course. And we never bought the house we really wanted, the one with a flyspeck island attached to the back yard, in the lake community where my mother lived. We loved the idea of sending kids to the island when they were bad, though -- "Go to your island!", we'd yell, and, if we were feeling particularly smug at the time, we'd imagine a drawbridge that we could pull up after the little hellions were safely across the water. No matter that the tiny stretch of water was small enough for even a shaky kindergartner to jump; it was the thought that counted: we knew we'd want to be able to exile our children when necessary.

But no: we were stuck with time-outs and stern talkings-to and the full panoply of deadly dull punishments that everyone else uses. The Wife still has Thing One go sit on the stairs when he gets particularly unruly, and he's thirteen now -- I bet we'll never manage to turn either of them Amish, even for a day.

Even their names didn't work out right. Long before we actually really planned to have kids, we planned a huge brood with "fun" names. The girls would be Roberta, Wilhelmina, and Thomasina -- called Rob, Bill, and Tom, of course -- and the boys would be Vivian, Leslie, and Evelyn. Sure, they'd probably get in a lot of fights and come home in tears from school more often than not, but a bad childhood is practically required for success later in life, right? I wanted to be one of those kooky families, like the ones in minor '70s YA novels, where the father is an absent-minded but brilliant something-or-other who smokes a pipe, while the mother is a swirling ball of energy that never quite gets anything done right. But it turned out that living like that was not just a lot of work, it also required being actually fictional.

Eventually, we settled down and started picking real names. And we focused on girls' names, because that's what parents do. We found it a lot easier to pick names for girls than boys -- our first-choice girl name actually fissioned into two names, because we liked the middle name so much. OK, we also had some family names, and those always have to be shoveled into the middle, so they can't do too much damage.

Neither of those names saw the light of day. If I remember right, they're still secret -- only The Wife and I know them. That seems silly now, but I'm certainly not revealing what Thingette 1 and Thingette 2 would have been called without an official sign-off from She Who Must Be Obeyed. We did manage to come up with one boys' name that we really liked -- with the same initials as mine, a touch that still makes me feel smug even now -- and smacked Thing 1 with that when he came along.

Thing 2, on the other hand, was named very late in the process -- we were vaguely fighting between Jack (The Wife's preference) and Graham (mine), when his eventual real name snuck in as a compromise candidate at the last minute. We only really decided on it the moment he was born, when I said "Look! It's <Thing 2>!" and that made it stick. (Making important decisions when your wife is under powerful sedatives, tied down to an operating table, and has several medical personnel elbows-deep in her abdomen is, I discovered, an excellent route to getting your way. Though I probably should have held out for Graham.)

You know, Thing 1 is a teenager now, and he's acting up like one. Maybe Amishness is just what he needs -- now where did I put that straw-hat and suspender catalog?

Getting Out of the House

I expected not to be able to make a real post tonight because The Wife and I had tickets for an Elvis Costello concert in Montclair (only a couple of towns over from us in bucolic suburban New Jersey, and much more convenient than NYC). We were looking forward to it; I was particularly happy to hear that EC had broken out the Spectacular Spinning Songbook for this tour, for the first time since the mid-80s. (I like randomness almost as much as I like silly, demented ideas.)

But Elvis was afflicted with bronchitis, and the show was "postponed." (No clue what that means, or if we'll ever get either a concert or our money back.)

We are smart parents, though, and we know the Inviolable Rule: Thou Shalt Take Advantage of Babysitting. So we regrouped, and had dinner at a nice restaurant that we've been going to for twenty years (Miele's, an excellent Italian joint in fair Verona) and then went to see a movie, just because we could.

(It was Bridesmaids, as the most adult general-release movie out there, and we liked it -- I expect I'll do a "review" here later.)

So I wasn't able to make a real post here tonight for a slightly different reason than I'd expected.

Another Busy Weekend

Yesterday wasn't so bad -- Thing 2 had a baseball practice, but he's high enough up in age now that parents don't stick around, so it's not a time sink for me. (One of the joys of parenting that non-parents have no idea about is the "drop-and-go." It starts with birthday parties, round about age six, and builds bit by bit -- and every time an occasion turns into a "drop-and-go," you feel happy for yourself, for saving time, and for your kid, for being big and smart and capable enough to handle this alone.) Otherwise, it was the usual Saturday routine -- newspaper, library, dinner at my mother's. And so, consequently, I goofed around and didn't do much of any consequence.

Today, though, we had a show in the city -- Boom Town, by Cirque Mechanics, an excellent new circus/physical theatre/acrobatics show at the New Victory -- and that meant there would be a hole of about five hours blown out of the middle of the day. (The Wife ended up staying home, ostensibly because she was scared about flooding -- there was a huge rain yesterday, and the river nearby did get into the "moderate flooding" range, so she picked up the slack on some house stuff like laundry and cleaning.) The boys and I had a great time in New York -- it was a bright sunny day; I got pulled out of the audience to be part of the show (and did pretty well, I think; two random strangers told me I was "great" afterward, which was gratifying); and we had a Tim Hortons donut before the show and a lunch at Schnipper's afterwards. (Thing 2 is a connoisseur of mac & cheese, as I may have mentioned, and Schnipper's is well-known for theirs. He approved of their concoction entirely, but, as ten-year-olds will, he still holds out that the very very best mac & cheese is made with Velveeta.)

It was all great, but it did take five hours, as expected. (By the way, I recommend both Schnipper's -- which is a good alternative to the midtown Shake Shack a few blocks north, with a wider menu and equally good burgers. Thing 1, who is a connoisseur of milkshakes, now claims that Schnipper's beats the Shack on their namesake -- and Boom Town, though you'll have more time to check out the former; Boom Town is on the last leg of a long tour and will be done after another week in NYC. So grab tickets now if you're interested.)

And I had e-mailed myself home a bunch of work to get done, besides the usual blogging that I always want to do. There were five items, in order of importance, so I did #1 yesterday (it was also pretty quick)...and then started on #3 (which was more fun) this morning before the trip. Before I finally quite to play some more Lego Star Wars, though, I did finish up #s 1-3, and spent another thirty-forty minutes wrestling with e-mail.


So, in the end, I felt virtuous enough -- I did what I needed to do. But #s 4 and 5 are still waiting for me -- I may be able to get to them at work, but who can actually do real dig-into-it, think-deeply projects at the office anymore? That's what weekends and nights were made for, right?

Looking for a New Assistant

Updated With Real Link!

This job hasn't been posted yet, but I have gotten all of the approvals signed off, so I can let the world know: I'm looking to hire a new assistant. (I'll update this post with a link to the job, once it has been posted; for now, interested parties could e-mail me directly at the address to the left.)

My previous assistant has moved on and up to a new job within the wonderful world of Wiley -- and please take that as a subtle hint that such fortune could eventually happen to my next assistant as well -- and so I desperately need someone new to sit in a cube just outside my office-icle and do all kinds of complicated publishing-related stuff.

The job reports both to me and to my boss, and supports a group of five marketers (some of us more than others), in a fast-paced, hard-working, fun-loving, adjectivally-hyphenated group we like to call Wiley Global Finance -- google us for more details. (And that "global" isn't simply puffery -- Wiley publishes globally in English, and this position will entail regular contact with colleagues around the world.)

We're looking for someone with 1-3 years of experience, but we're open to various kinds of experience: publishing, digital media, marketing in other areas, or something else related to finance, accounting, and markets. Our group is aggressively moving into digital products of various kinds -- ebooks are the most minor, obvious piece of that -- and we're looking to find someone who will help us continue moving forward. We have openings at the marketing assistant level only rarely; this is not an opportunity that comes very often.

John Wiley & Sons is a strongly growing, rock-solid company (over two hundred years old, and check out the course of our stock price over the last year) that publishes heavily in the less-glamorous ends of the information world -- we're public, so you could easily check to see how we're fared over the past few years and what our leadership team says about the future. And we're located in lovely Hoboken -- not New York, but you can't see New York from New York, either -- which is great for people who live in New Jersey and the southern half of Manhattan.

This is a "book publishing" job, if you want to be excessively reductive about it, but that may not be true in five years -- or two, or even one. Wiley is a company run by smart people with real plans and visions, and I love what our future looks like. Please contact me directly or click here for more details -- and please feel free to let anyone else know about this job.

Tonight's Festivities

The Wife and I spent more than a hour this evening chatting with a gentleman from a company that provides sump pumps -- have I mentioned the recent flood and our sleepness night? it's been much on our minds since -- coming to the conclusion that we'll need to move all of my books five feet away from the walls in the basement (where she exiled me and the books when Thing 1 was born) to have this work done.

As you might guess, I have a lot of books, so this idea does not fill me with joy. In fact, I'm utterly dreading it, since I'm pretty sure I have at least a ton of paper that will need to be shifted. (Shifted once, so the men can do their work, and then, eventually, shifted back again, probably to new shelves.)

I should be writing here about some book I've read or movie I've seen, but all I can do is obsess about moving all of those mounds of paper. Maybe tomorrow.

The Creek Did Rise

The Wife and I had a tiring night last night, baling water out of our basement as fast as it could wick up through the floor -- and that was pretty darn quick, some of the time -- but we kept it contained, and there should be only minor damage. (So I'm doing nothing like complaining -- there are hundreds of people two and three streets away who got several feet of water for the second time in a week.) We finally decided it was oozing slowly enough to put towels down and go to sleep about 4:30, and which point we were both pretty punchy.

That did mean that I didn't have any blogging time yesterday, particularly since the working day was busy and eventful, with a visit to an undisclosed location on Long Island to pick up data for a product none of you will care about -- but which will nevertheless eat the lunch right out of the hands of our competitors. I ended up with a bare two hours in the office to get everything necessary done -- which I did, of course; I'm a superstar like that-- and that led to a certain frantic air. And transportation has been interesting for the last several days, what with rising rivers and so on.

What I should be doing now is writing reviews of Connie Willis's double-decker doorstop Blackout/All Clear and Mary Robinette Kowal's Nebula-nominated Regency fantasy Shades of Milk and Honey, but I don't think I have the brain cells for those today. Maybe I can catch up on my editorial cartoons for Editorial Explanations (plug plug), but that's about the limit of my ratiocinative abilities right now.

Hope that the weather is treating you better than that. (Not that my weather stacks up compared to the Japanese earthquake/tsunami, which I'm trying not to look at.)

This Is Not a Blog Post

So I had a 4-7 meeting today, complete with dinner -- there are some issues you just don't have the time to hash out during the working day, and it actually was a great meeting that accomplished what it needed to.

Unfortunately, coming out of it, I looked at the train schedule that isn't effective until Sunday, and tried to catch the 7:17 train. Which, since it wasn't Sunday yet, was actually a 7:00 train today, and had already left.

Now, the next train was at 8:56.

• A normal man would have slipped into the bar at the Hoboken terminal to while away a few hours.
• A workaholic man would have gone back to the office to get things done.
• A smart man would have taken the PATH into New York, and caught an express bus out from there.

But this man got on a train at 7:32 that went part of the way, caught a transfer, and ended up, two stops shy of my car, at about 8:30. On a platform without any real shelter. In the pouring rain. Until 9:39, when that next train finally arrived.

Thus there will be no blogging tonight. Tomorrow, regular service will resume, God willing and the creek don't rise.

(And that last is not a metaphor; we're under a flood watch and may well be evacuated in the next 24 hours. Ah, the wonders of living in riverine country!)

What I Did Today

Many things, actually, but the memorable one was:

• spent two and a half hours in line, on a very cold street in Clifton, NJ, so my older son could get the autograph of someone who calls himself "The Angry Video Game Nerd" online [1].

They say that you do amazing things for your kids, but they don't know the half of it. This guy mostly focuses on retro-gaming, which made me feel simultaneously old and nostalgic. When your sons tell you about a funny online video in which some guy rants entertainingly about a twenty-year-old game, it will surprise them at least a little bit when you turn out to have a deep knowledge of that game yourself. And then when his crowd ranges from the age of your son (12) to perhaps a decade and a half older than that, you realize that none of them could have known the old Nintendo or Atari systems as anything but nostalgia.

I did get a rare moment of appreciation from Thing 1, and he even admitted that he "owes me one." Of such joys are parenting made....


[1] First, remember that this is coming from a man who calls himself "G.B.H. Hornswoggler" online, and realize that I'm defining, not complaining. Second, he seemed like a very personable, friendly guy once we finally got up to him.

What a Weekend Is For

I'd had vague ideas about taking my two sons to Kids' Day at the New York Comic-Con today -- I think I missed the last year or two of that anyway, purely for having-too-many-other-things-to-do reasons -- but the kibosh was put on that when The Wife announced that her parents were taking the boys pumpkin-picking today. (I'm not sure I was up for a trip in to the Javitz with two rambunctious tweens, anyway.)

So, instead, The Wife and I spent most of today putting up a new shed in our backyard. (If any of you knew us, you'd be laughing now: we spent the last five years, at least, talking about how we needed a new shed -- the old one was there when we moved in, but collapsed under a big snow some time around 1996. And we bought this shed -- it's from Rubbermaid, requires a lot of assembly, and comes in a big box -- over two months ago, since which time it's been lurking in the driveway, silently mocking us.)

Many bruised knuckles and six hours later, though, there's finally a place for the lawnmower and our (rarely used) bicycles, back at the end of the yard. And I've accomplished something physical for one of the few times this year -- thank god I don't have to do anything like that again any time soon!

Lazy and/or Busy Weekend

My immediate excuse for not having the usual Monday-morning "Reviewing the Mail" post up on time is that Blogger was acting up last night as I was writing it -- it was refusing to save, so I just stopped working on it.

Of course, I could easily have written it all up in Word and had it ready for when Blogger was working again...but who wants to do that on a holiday weekend? So it'll be delayed until some time later today.

The weekend has been an interesting mix of frenzy and lethargy -- the family had a lot of things to do yesterday (it was Pompton Day in my hometown, which generated about three activities, plus the end of summer bowling and other things), but I've been very lazy otherwise. I've been sitting in front of this computer a lot, but I'm not even checking my blogs -- just playing online games or otherwise slaughtering time blithely. It would b e wonderful...if I weren't the type of person who feels guilty when I'm not getting things accomplished.

Maybe now, in the latter half of the last day of the three-day weekend, I'll find some energy and get things done. Or perhaps not.

One Man's Relationship to His Cat

There is a cat living in the same house as I do, and her name is Marbles. Now, she's not my cat, since I never wanted a cat and don't particularly like this one. But I have young children, and so a fur-bearing domestic animal eventually became part of the picture; I've kept it to one cat, and I intend to keep it that way.

Marbles, in my mind, belongs to my two sons. But they don't feed her, or change her litter, or even play with her very much -- she's just there, running around the house at random, in much the same way that they do. They do claim to love her.

On the other hand, I don't claim to love her, or even like her. In fact, I tell her quite often that I don't like her, but -- cats having a brain the size of a walnut and only a very limited capacity for understanding human speech -- that doesn't seem to have had any effect on her behavior.

Maybe she's more motivated by actions than words, though -- I am the one who feeds her nearly all of the time. No one else ever seems to notice that her food bowl is empty, or that she needs water. And I am the one who, every night, places the auxiliary food and water bowls in the basement and then entices her downstairs with greenies.

But, again, I don't like her, or give her any affection. And that recently brought me to a realization.

I am my cat's Wire Mother.

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Listening to: Bess Rogers - Travel Back
via FoxyTunes

Sentences I Never Thought I'd Hear Myself Say

"{Thing 1}, don't just stand naked in the hallway scratching your butt!"

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Now playing: The Breeders - Don't Call Home
via FoxyTunes

A Small Feeling of Happiness

It can now be told: my employer is the 12th best large company to work for in New Jersey.

Next year, we hope to shoulder Amper, Politziner & Mattia LLP aside and maybe, just maybe, even break into the top ten!

(And, interestingly for my current work, five of the top eleven large firms to work for are accounting practices.)