wash'em away

I probably shouldn’t be creeping around the customer cubicles at night and shooting photos after the occupants have gone home. I sometimes wonder when someone in loss-prevention will notice a flash in the darkness and send someone to confront me but I have a feeling no one’s really paying attention to those security monitors. It’s interesting to observe the installations in cubicles that I would normally never see. And occasionally there are laugh-out-loud items like this one.

The game of Musical Macs I was compelled to play after my Mac had a nervous breakdown Wednesday is over and I’m back at my own machine in my own little home away from home, my cubicle. The doctor was Out until Sunday so I had to work where I could find an open station and it was a real pain settling into a different cubicle each night and having to drag in my chair, my mouse, my back-, foot- and wrist-supports, my headphones, and my water bottle to get comfy. When I'm looking at ten or more hours at a station I need to dig in. Then each individual has customized all the desktop preferences of his or her mac and I have to disable everything. While dashboards and widgets are well and good, I think of them as toys and I don’t want them unexpectedly popping onto the screen while I am in the midst of serious business all because I have accidentally pressed a hotkey while typing.

It was so much easier in the olden pre-press days before computers. The only thing I had to worry about was keeping my twelve-inch metal line gauge (pica pole, or in the most crass vernacular, “ruler”) jammed into the back pocket of my jeans and keeping an eye on my heavy-duty shears I used for cutting film. Most people had a preferred light table; maybe it was the one next to the film processor, where the intoxicating aroma of developer and fixing solution would elevate you to your own personal work “zone”, or maybe it was where you could fix that eye in the back of your head at the film churning out of the processor so you could grab the next sheet and start your slicing and dicing act, but usually preference was dependent on how you liked the double-barreled tape dispenser in the tray attached to your table.

I don’t miss the fumes, standing on concrete floors, or the high decibel level, but the simplicity of the setup is a nostalgic memory.