Moving

My job is moving.

Four or five years ago now we were supposed to be moving to San Antonio. They'd been grooming me for the job of Managing Editor, but I didn't want to move to San Antonio, Texas. San Antonio, Oregon - sure; San Antonio, Illinois - I could do that. San Antonio, anywhere in the deep south - fuck that noise. So the job was given to one of the new staff members. I really had no problems with that. But she and another editor went to San Antonio and the rest of us somehow never followed.

Later there was another effort to move us to San Antonio that went nowhere. I believe it was some Chief of Staff who wanted us to move. Usually the Surgeon General would just follow the recommendation, but this time he saw that we'd lose most of our staff and be cut off from most of our best resources.

After the BRAC (Base Relocation and Closure) it was determined that we would have to move somewhere. Alas, the people who were supposed to determine where weren't doing their job at all. Months of them playing Solitaire wasn't advancing things. The Chief of Staff was still mad about the previous Surgeon General ignoring his recommendation so he was having a fit and demanding that we move to San Antonio. So what if the staff we have down there have been shuffled from temporary building to temporary building more than once a year and there was no place for the rest of us to go.

So our Colonel went hunting for a place. She checked with every military base within a 2-3 hour drive of DC. Luckily she found some newish barracks at Ft Dietrich that someone else was leaving. The Chief of Staff threw fits. The guy whose job it was to find us a place threw fits. Some other people did, too. That wasn't her job. How dare she take initiative? The newer Surgeon General asked them what they'd done about finding us a place. Nothing? Then shut the fuck up.

There was some initiative to make us split-ops just to get the Chief of Staff to chill the fuck out. We'd expand our Texas operations and get into new areas of publishing. A new building had offices set aside for the offices of the Texas staff and room given for expansion. That theoretical future space has been given to someone else. I have to keep telling Bruce that space is gone and he needs to stop telling people to send their resumes to the Managing Editor.

As I hinted at earlier, there are people in our Ft Dietrich offices. They've having some building space across the street rejiggered for them. But it wasn't long before it was discovered that this wall that was supposed to go was load bearing. All work stops. They go back to the drawing board. Everything gets delayed by six months. But there's also people waiting to move into our current offices. For some reason the people in our new offices don't have to move to make room for us, but we do have to move to make room for someone else.

The movers come one week from today.

I'm trying to work on a time sensitive book while also sorting 20+ years of edit trails, making sure all the data is backed up, and electronics are properly handled so that nothing that can't sit in a Pod in a parking lot over a Maryland winter doesn't end up there.