I found this post on And io9, under the heading “I’m *shudder* Here!”
Funnily enough, I’ve learned all this from Chris Knight’s excellent Youtube video, “The Surprisingly Weird World of Interior Design.” This is a brilliant primer on many topics of which I am nothing short of a toad in the path: The architecture of the world’s most bizarre homes, the ins and outs of all kinds of interiors, and even the near-psychedelic life of a designer. It covers such wonderful things as what it takes to make wallpaper, whose designs benefit from good lighting and whose designs benefit from constant peeling and re-peeling. It has just been republished, so if you want to soak up some of this authentic, gleaned from-the-round-up-of-architectural-insoundings of the world, check it out. I recommend you watch it right now.
Even though the entire video is somewhat bat-squeaking weird, this excerpt is my favorite one: “Getting Packages in My Building Is Chaotic.” It’s one of those spontaneous, almost tersely written moments where the nuts and bolts of the world become just kind of overwhelming to process; it’s half-wild, and half-just plain funny. I thought I’d share it here:
What’s at stake? How do you deal with packages? You’ve gotta get the mail, after all! Some of my harshest critics– i.e., ZZZigglesits-nutbags-but-means-good-was-still-the-best-of-the-sort Twitter users– look down upon my behavior here. Even I started getting mail in the early 1990s, before I had a building, and people make fun of me for being narcissistic. So what do I do? I got rid of my “batch and file” system and tried to automate it as much as possible. I’ve got scanners that will tell me the price and where they sent me packages, so that I can just download the printed mailing address onto a list. I record what shipping costs and time I’ve saved, so I can claim my salary out of those costs for whatever delivery system I’ve got in place. Then there’s one damn thing to find. I have a new printer built in, and I plug it in to use it to produce the mailing address. Then I’ve gotta figure out where to place my ink and toner cartridges and make sure they fit. I’ve got to inventory and secure an electric typewriter for my takeout orders, as my old machines just don’t have the kind of keys I like. On the outside of the house, the yard and grass are for emergency use, but I also have to think about where I’m dumping the mower parts when I leave work or when it breaks down. Plus, I have to figure out if I’m running low on paper and other paper supplies, because that’s another way I manage the bills. I got a gardener who uses the sprinkler to water the yard instead of grass, but only when it’s snowing or raining or getting dark, otherwise he might kill himself. My car was recently repossessed, and there’s a long-term parking space I need to use. What really is stressed is that I only have one paint on the walls: a trim color. I think it’s Sungreen, by JC Penney. I don’t know if the adjacent rooms are painted in it, but I sure as hell don’t have that. I’ve got a stencil artist on my team who can paint it for me, but I’d need two order forms from JC Penney or a quip from Marvellous Book Guy on social media.
Read on.
The most important bit, however, is at the end of the paragraph. The last line is:
All this is, of course, completely insane. But I don’t know how to solve all of this. I feel like I’m stuck here.
You know what, I’m stuck here. For more reasons, I feel, than for simple technological reasons.