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A blog wherein a literary agent will sometimes discuss his business, sometimes discuss the movies he sees, the tennis he watches, or the world around him. In which he will often wish he could say more, but will be obliged by business necessity and basic politeness and simple civility to hold his tongue. Rankings are done on a scale of one to five Slithy Toads, where a 0 is a complete waste of time, a 2 is a completely innocuous way to spend your time, and a 4 is intended as a geas compelling you to make the time.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Status - Quo!

So a quick report in on our move, a little less lavishly illustrated than it should be because I don't quite have the time...

After a day of packing on Monday, the movers started loading our Queens office into the truck at around 9:10 on Tuesday morning.

When that task was mostly complete, Eddie and I chaperoned the parade of the Eeyores, as they headed from our office to the new office over the 59th St. Bridge with stops along the way at places like the Magnolia Bakery, Serendipity 3, Bloomingdales, the site of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency offices in Joshua's early years in the business, etc.  I will gather many photos on this blog eventually, but for now if you go to twitter.com/awfulagent or twitter.com/eddieschneider you can find.

Now, this was a little silly, but also a lot of fun, and ultimately, what else were Eddie and I going to do?  The computers were in boxes, the routers and the servers and the ethernet cables and the track pads and the keyboards were in boxes, and for all our leisure and silliness, the truck beat us to the new office by five or ten minutes.  It was a sheer delight, every minute of it, we hope you'll enjoy the pictures, and I expect we gave some lasting memories to people we encountered along the way.  Because it's not every day you see a guy holding four Eeyores walking across the 59th St. Bridge, or posing six Eeyores on the bridge, or bring Eeyore into the Magnolia Bakery.  I highly recommend that every move have a well-documented March of The Eeyores -- but buy your own, you're not borrowing ours.

I was happy as we started to direct the movers on where to put things.  The new office is a tad smaller than our old office, and even though the old office was bigger than we needed it to be, I'd walk around the new office and worry that it wasn't big enough.  I don't think we have to worry too much for a while.  We have nice nooks for Sam and Joshua, Eddie and Lisa, Krystyna and Christa, and for Brady, and room for more filing cabinets, more bookshelves, three or four more people.  Room enough for a while.  Not that we need to rush to fill every nook and cranny, but it's nice to know we have the room to in-fill as the space grows out.

By the end of the day on Wednesday, we'd pretty much unpacked everything and pretty much had everything in its place.

Which isn't to say everything is perfect.

Joshua decided to take keys to one of the filing cabinets home with him Tuesday night, because it seemed like a safer place when the office was in disarray.  So of course, Wednesday morning, the keys go into Joshua's pocket, and then aren't to be found when he gets to the office.  We see a locksmith in our future!

Joshua would feel worse about his stupidity if there weren't contributions from everyone else in the office.  In particular, there seem to be some people in the office who have trouble reading the boxes that phones come in.  One person goes to buy a base station for the phone system and buys a cordless base extension instead -- everything the base does except without an actual cord to plug in a phone line.  Then person #2 goes to buy a basic phone with answering machine and returns with phone without answering machine.  The locksmith will probably cost less than the phones.

The phone and internet worked wonderfully until we tried to use them.

But then we realize we need to restart the router because the internet is getting a bit slow within two or three hours of our first full day in the new space.  And then we need to restart the router again.  And again.  And again and again and again and again.  If we restart the router every hour, we can probably get fifteen or twenty minutes of functionality before the phone and the internet become theoretical constructs.  So Time Warner will be back on Friday afternoon.  No idea what we will do on Thursday. It would almost be better for the internet to just not work at all, rather than to have it work just often enough that you think you can use it without ever working long enough that you actually can.

We got food!  Elizabeth Moon, Peter V. Brett and Myke Cole have all helped to sustain us, as did John Berlyne at the Zeno Agency.

We got the first buds of the spring royalty season, some  Heyne royalties for the second half of 2013.  Over the next four weeks, we expect thousands of pages of royalty statements.  We like royalty season, and we hate royalty season.

We still need to find our way to the closest Post Office.  Which, according to usps.com, keeps very strange hours of 7am to 3pm.  We do have a mailbox at the corner.

We are starting to explore local lunch options.  Sadly, in LIC we would get delivery from the excellent Sunnyside Pizza.  At the new office, we can pretty much step outside our building and step into Little Italy Pizza, but that doesn't compare, not remotely, with the yumminess of Sunnyside Pizza.

If it weren't for the danged internet I'd be super happy at how well the move was going.  While we have some work we can do internally, it's distracting to try and do it.  It's hard to believe that my career started far enough back in the future that nobody know what an internet was, and now it's hard to run anything without it.  But where things were solely in our control, I'd give us an A- for doing things about as smoothly as you can hope for them to go.

1 comment:

Jessica Strider said...

Glad the move went well and I hope the internet gets fixed for you quickly. Loved your twitter pics.