Truck Broke Down

On my trip to Oregon I got this iconic photo (through the windshield) of Shasta’s Black Butte.

I took a trip back through Oregon and Humboldt and at the end of it the truck broke down. On the 23rd of April I left Eureka at the Police station and experienced a sad series of events where I had to hire a tow truck and rent a room. That day I met Dave the tow truck driver and countless automobile maintenance, sales and rental personnel. I made about a million phone calls to friends, family and rental dealerships. It was a learning experience. I made a lot of mistakes which I am not certain I can avoid in the future. However, I did learn a lot about how communication factored into solving my problem in addition to the vagaries of the business day.

I ended up missing a party that I really wanted to attend but I was happy that I was able to use my skills to make wise choices and when I was able to see through my own frustration was able to even enjoy myself and even explore the local areas. Many of the steps of getting home were easily intuited from previous experiences and I wrote the whole experience down in my notebook as it was happening.

This is a regular series chronicling my life at regular intervals. This Memo series is meant to be a retrospective of what I have written and experienced. In each of these posts I use my notes in conjunction with memory, mementos and souvenirs to create a snap shot of my life. I wrote this on the 26th of May and posted it to the blog on June 13th.

The Inner Workings of Firms

I was working on resumes and dog walking; riding my bike around town and working at the coalition offices. I was reviewing my old resumes because of an email from an old coworker. I had been reflecting a lot in my writings over this incident and it gave me a lot of insight on how firms work. I believe what happened is my old coworker called a number of us about a job posting and management from the old job heard about it. I thought that the progression in of emails in my inbox told an interesting story since it didn’t seem especially clear to anyone what was going on. However, after reflecting upon the incidents in aggregate I could only conclude that this was part of some back stage tug-of-war over skilled personnel. I never felt all that close to any of the people who had contacted me and that it was terribly out of context for them. So to check on whether I was hallucinating, I told the story to a number of disinterested parties and they all seemed to say the same thing. Clearly the inner workings of firms aren’t very opaque at all.

I went to the Berkeley Map Library. It has the largest collection of air photos I have ever seen.


This is a regular series chronicling my life at regular intervals. This Memo series is meant to be a retrospective of what I have written and experienced. In each of these posts I use my notes in conjunction with memory, mementos and souvenirs to create a snap shot of my life. I wrote this on the 26th of May and posted it to the blog on June 13th.