Dolphin With Rabies

Life on beautiful Cape Cod.

Thursday, November 20, 2003

Ghost Hunting

At long last, I'm finally getting around to editing and posting this.

My office is in the middle of nowhere, or at least as close to nowhere as you can get on Cape Cod. From the entrance, I can walk five minutes on the road in one direction, and be at the ocean. If I walk in the other direction, I'll pass a handful of summer homes, one other business, and then be surrounded by conservation land. I can walk to the back of our offices and jump down into the salt marshes.

Our office building used to be a single-story house with a finished basement. Now it's all been chopped up and converted. Most of my department's activity takes place in the finished basement section. About half of the basement is above ground, half is below ground. I sit by the back entrance which is the part above ground. This part of the house is poorly insulated, and I can hear every whistle and moan of the wind blowing off the marshes and past my little window and the back door. The cold from the ground seeps up from the basement floor. Happily, we're allowed a liberal hand with the thermostat, which we take full advantage of.

The building is drafty, which is why I'm usually complaining about my coworkers leaving doors open. If the door to the stairs is left open, all the warm air in the basement whooshes up to the rarely used first floor, leaving us warming our hands over our monitors.

It will not surprise any reader that a poorly insulated, indifferently converted building has a lot of odd noises. That it shakes in the wind coming from the nearby ocean and rattles in the wind and produces bumps and creaks and curious sounds that set the imagination grinding.

For scheduling reasons, I've been working by myself in the afternoons. It gets dark early these days and the gloom seems to press in, but I like being by myself, I'm familiar with the noises of the place. I've worked here for several years, I know the irritating thunk-thunk of the stair door shaking in the draft, sounding like someone walking up the stairs. I know the moan of the wind hitting the gaps of the window behind me just right and the accompanying little bursts of cold air and the ways that noise travels when the upstairs windows are open.

But, I swear I haven't heard this before.

Yesterday, as evening came early with the rain, I kept hearing the sort of noises you hear when someone is using the upstairs space. The trouble is, no one is up there currently, they're all on travel. The noises never resolved into anything definate like footsteps or a chair being scraped back from a table, but throughout that long afternoon, I'd think that I heard something, stop to listen, and it would all go quiet. I'd go back to what I was doing, and then I'd think I heard it again.

This went on for several hours. I know it doesn't sound like much, but that sort of waiting and listening wears on you. By the time quitting time rolled around, I locked the door and ran out of there. Half telling myself that the place was haunted and half grumbling at myself that it was a freakin' window that wasn't closed all the way and I was spooking for no reason. At any rate, I wasn't going to investigate in the dark by myself.

So today when all was bright and cheery, I went upstairs to investigate. The section I suspected of causing trouble was the converted porch. It's a place that people sit during the summer, it has a nice view of the marshes and the water, and is battered by wind at this time of year. I was thinking that maybe some patio furniture was getting dragged in the wind, or a window was open or something else equally explicable.

Nope, nothing. A casual investigation showed me that the furniture was much too heavy to be shifting around, and mockingly, books and papers showed no sign of having been disturbed or moved or anything that would be consistent with an unusual draft blowing through loudly enough to cause noise.

Nothing in the back rooms either. No open windows, nothing loose, and nothing disturbed.

The one item that seems like a likely possibility is a sort of poor-man's French door that is a separate entrance onto the converted porch. It's only a glass door and a screen, and it doesn't look very secure to me. Maybe it rattles in the wind. As I said, the upstairs windows when open do cause noise to travel in a very odd way to the downstairs.

I guess the only way I'm going to find out is if I hear it again, and go upstairs and check to see if that door's the problem. Yes, I'll go upstairs in the dark by myself to see if the strange noise really is what I think it is. Yeah right. I'll sit right by my desk near the entrance, prepared to head for the hills at the first opportunity.

Now that I've had a chance to reflect, it occurs to me that my "ghosts" could be projection. I'd rather be working somewhere else, and this is a thought that I try not to let dominate all of my time at work. Some days I succeed better than others. Small wonder that I hear things that go bump in the night, it's an externalization of my feelings about the place.

Yes, keep up that thought. It's all projection. So, I won't have any trouble heading upstairs in the dark by myself next time I hear noises. Right?

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Update

The job interview seemed to go well, but I didn't get the job. But, I'm not surprised. I haunt the job search websites that have Cape Cod listings, and I saw this one job listed on three different sites.

It gets better. One of those sites lists how many times a particular job has been viewed. On just one site, this particular job has been viewed 300 times. I'm sure there's plenty of repeat views on that one, but sweet Jesus, that's enough to make you weep.

I know the market is real competitive. There's a sort of comfort in knowing that you're one of a teeming horde of job seekers. It makes you feel less horribly unemployable and tainted. I was always picked last for gym class, so I think not being "picked" makes me especially glum. Not that I have issues or anything.

So, I try to head off the gloominess and feeling sorry for myself. I work at being very logical and reasonable about it. I'm competing with literally hundreds of people, and I was weak in a key skill they wanted. But, no matter how logical and reasonable you're trying to be, it still tastes of frustration.

Ahem. On a lighter note. I ACED my Accounting test. I am taking a semester and the summer off though, I really need some time to refresh.

Also, the only logical thing for me to take in the Spring is Tax Accounting, and I really will weep if I take Tax Accounting. The only thing that would make me cry harder would be Payroll.

Mass NARAL concert. We raised decent money, although it would have been nice to have gotten more of a turnout. One real pleasure was listening to our guest, singer Jess Klein. I'm always dubious about singer-songwriters, many of them are dismal, but she had a fine strong voice and wonderful control over her guitar. Her voice sounds a bit like Stevie Nicks, only much better. She did one a cappella piece and I was amazed by how well she pulled it off, a cappella is usually done only by people who really shouldn't be doing it. Her music reminds me a bit of Sheryl Crow, but a bit more indie. If this sounds at all interesting, check her out. I think she deserves much more attention than she's getting.

G'night all. I'll definately be blogging tomorrow. I need to go upstairs at work and possibly confront a ghost.

Saturday, November 08, 2003

Wish Me Luck

I have a job interview. My stomach is doing flip-flops just thinking about it. I really want to work at this place.

I have an Accounting test.

I'm working the Mass Naral pro-choice event. Given our current political climate, that ought to be a chipper occasion.

Thursday, November 06, 2003

The few, the proud--Cape Cod Bloggers, Part II

Okay, there's myself and Dave. Who else blogs on Cape Cod? There are a few I've found.

This is more of an ongoing joint effort by several friends than a blog per se, but very well put together. I can't believe these kids are in high school, there's plenty of adults that dream of putting together something as good as The Marvullo Company.

The Cape Cod Times webmaster now has a blog called Blog O' Matters.

Oh, and I've had him on my links for awhile, but I've never mentioned Bueno Guy.

Ditto for Terrapin Photo Diary. Best line ever for why turtles are the focus of his research:

“Because when you’re retired and looking for a research target, you ought to pick a critter you have a reasonable chance of catching.” .

Sunday, November 02, 2003

What is it that you do do?

Dave wanted to know what sort of place I work in. Without going into too many details that could come back to haunt me, I work in publishing for an extremely dysfunctional organization.

Most publishing outfits share certain idiosyncrasies. You're always on a deadline, you're always behind, and you're always kissing someone's unreasonable ass. There's always finger-pointing going on, and an attempt to assign blame, even though the real problem is that the schedule is unreasonable and someone from outside the company has decided to be an unreasonable ass.

There's a certain lack of perspective. Spouses get neglected and children go barefoot in the snow because the entire world can collapse over a typo.

Now, this is just the normal world of a publishing outfit. The ineptitude that I bitch about is just normal ineptitute.

Just so we're clear, I'm not a dainty thing that wants to run screaming into the night because my workplace is stressful or my coworkers are boobs. I do work out a lot of my venom by complaining about those things, but it's partially displacement. I mean yes, I do find those things stessful, but those aren't the big gotcha stressors. I don't even discuss much of what occurs at my work because it's very specific.

Think good thoughts for me getting a new job, m'kay?