October 1, 2004 was cool and overcast. The executive decision was taken that we should go down to main campus for breakfast and then take it easy the rest of the day. We all knew what was coming – the huge rush of shows and orders that was already being referred to as Black October, something we had hoped to avoid until the lab was up and running and we had everything sorted out. As it was, we were only somewhat operational, but it was good enough that we truly thought we’d earned a day to slow-roll things.
There were even leaves turning on some of the trees. It really felt autumnal, and after the chaos of summer and moving halfway across the country, it felt like I was starting to get back into a groove, to get some of my powers back – almost two months at the new job and I was finally finding my comfort zone. And as I wandered back to see some interesting things I can’t discuss to this day, I thought, “this is going to be good.”
That’s when everything went black.
Power outage. Big one. Entire town. We rushed back to the lab to find no power there either. With a little scuffling, we got a generator and emergency power together sufficient to image some machines, but external communications were out, which meant no FedEx machine. Which meant that the tremendous order would have to be sent not with the easy stick-on labels that would have taken five minutes to produce, but with handwritten airbills. Which was a fiasco.
In the end, we wound up commandeering a friend’s Jeep and loading it down with cases strapped on all sides like some sort of third-world bus. Our manager was trying to bribe the guys at the airport to hold the plane five minutes so we could get away okay. Meanwhile, the other contractor helped me park the forklift, and we sat on the curb and smoked and watched the sun set, wondering if our badges would work the next day.
They did. But over the next six weeks plus, our manager would be summarily dismissed and our director would run the show personally, with the daily 8 AM meeting to hand out paper lists of orders already prioritized, and “get as far down the list as you can.” I spent plenty of days holed up at a bench, with our primitive imaging system that only kinda sorta scaled, barricaded behind a seven-foot wall of boxes and shipping cases, trying to piece together a dozen laptops for shipping using whatever scraps of foam and accessories I could assemble. In retrospect, it’s flabbergasting we weren’t all lined up and shot.
But it was during that time that I discovered Virgin Radio, and set to streaming with Martin Collins and his “Mellow Madness” or Suggs doing Party Classics on Friday, with an endless array of commercials for things I’d never heard of. It was very nearly the same sort of five-months-on whiplash I’d “enjoyed” in 1997 – here I am, new town, new job, new life that I would never have expected as the old one wound down. Which was actually pretty impressive – for the second time in a decade, I had fallen ass-backward into a new home and a new job far from the old one, this time in the company of a six foot blonde.
The first time that happened, I realized I was an incredibly lucky person. Nothing since has given me any reason to deviate from this diagnosis.