Jacques' Brain Drain

I’m busting my #@%%^ packing up for the last run out to Phoenix. It’s going reasonably well, and I expect to be out of here tonight. It’ll be good to be gone, but Gods it’s a bitch to pack up an entire apartment.

In good news, all the utility stuff is done, and the Arizona board of Massage Therapy has finally gotten it’s stuff together and started processing G’s paperwork. She should be licensed within the week – and able to start working at Massage Envy in Phoenix.

OK – back to the cotton mines.

We just got back from Phoenix a few days ago. Gianna got the job, and now I have to finish getting everything pulled together, packed and out of here. Moving is definately a large bore annoyance, but at least we were able to store the stuff from the first trip in its final location. Gods alone know that moving it twice was going to make me cranky.

We’re also making plans to do a retreat at Sekhmet Temple the last night of our stay in Las Vegas. That should be good, but will mean that we have to crash somewhere after the ceremony, and before we get started – as it finishes at dawn, and we’re not going to drive for 7 hours after being up all night. We’ll work something out.

Right now, we’re going through the BS about getting utilities turned off here and turned on there. Dealing with all those utility companies is making Gianna’s hair white, but it’s coming along.

Changes in technology change other areas. Human beings have a bizarre tendency with respect to those changes – they tend to overestimate change in the short term and underestimate change in the long term. Take landlords as a classic example. The basic business model has remained essentially unchanged over an extended period of time. It would be easy to think that communications, of all things, would have little effect on things. It would also be wrong.

People stay with bad landlords for one of two reasons. One is recurring cost – they cannot afford to go elsewhere because the monthly expense exceeds their budget. The other is switching cost – The cost of moving elsewhere exceeds the present edvantage of doing so. The first is not affected by advances in communications. The second, however, is affected – and affected strongly.

Take as an example my landlord. I live at Tamarus Park Apartments in Las Vegas, Nevada. After fighting with them over the last year to fix the roof, make the swimming pool and hot-tub which I am paying for as part of my rent fit and safe to actually use, and generally perform their duties as caretakers of the facility in an adequate manner, I finally decided to move. So far, this is a normal situation for them – they will simply get another tenant to squeeze.

Unfortunately for them, the situation is changing. Now – pissing off a tenant leaves it far more likely that they’ll blog about their problems instead of wasting their anger with mere yelling. One or two such posts will likely be ignored – as they properly should. Over time, however, a search for say “Tamarus Park Apartments Las Vegas” would start to turn up these other websites. This will turn up as younger generations, already used to searching for information on the Internet, research prospective apartments.

Over time, I expect that this will have an effecto on the ability for landlords to replace tenants they have mistreated. Basically, the current business model employed depends on a scarcity of communications which no longer exists. I expect the next two decades to be interesting ones as this plays out.

I’ve gotten the trailer loaded for the first trip. You wouldn’t believe what you can pack into a 5 1/2 x 8 ft trailer – but it’s a lot. Three bookcases full of books, two file cabinets and their contents, a couch, a futon and its frame, and a bunch of other miscellaneous items to numerous to mention.

The coding I’ve been doing is stalled. The entire apartment looks as if it had been picked up by an angry giant and shaken – with debris strewn in every corner, and nothing even resembling order anywhere. Blueberry has figured out we’re moving again. As usual, she’s afraid to be left behind – especially since we’ve packed up most of the apartment, but haven’t even started moving her stuff. (She’ll forgive us – eventually…)

Things are finally pulling together for the move to Arizona. We’re already starting to shove things into boxes, and G is interviewing this coming Wednesday with Massage Envy. W’re going to haul a bunch of stuff up in the trailer, and drop it off in a self-storage place there, to simplify things for the move.

It’ll be really nice to get away from the neon and the noise. I despise Las Vegas, and will be far happier if I can put it behind me. As far as I’m concerned, Las Vegas is a lot like Woonsocket – It’s a great place to be from.