Moving from one part of the the San Francisco Bay Area to another seems like it should be a pretty minor change, but it’s actually been the biggest thing that happened with me in the last six months.
Originally we chose to live in San Mateo because of its location halfway between the tech centers of San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
It’s about forty-five minutes to an hour by train or by car, going north or south respectively, to reach a high concentration of tech companies.
There are others in between, such as the one I worked at before my current job, but by and large things are more residential in between, less concentrated.
For the same reason, San Mateo is fairly desirable for people working in the tech ecosystem and the housing prices reflect that.
There are tech companies on the east side of the bay, but not nearly as many, so prices aren’t nearly as ridiculous there as on the Peninsula.
So, we discovered that we could afford a condo on the water in the city of Alameda, which is practical as long as I don’t need to insist on a short commute to Silicon Valley and the South Bay.
At this point in my career and in the present economic climate, this seems like a reasonable thing to give up.
The advantages are the chance to own something instead of relying on some property management company’s restraint in raising rents, a beautiful view of the bay practically at our doorstep, and a much more pleasant commute by ferry instead of train.
Aside from the cost and trouble of moving, the other main sacrifice this cost us was having to leave our comfortable community and our friends we made over the past four years, and a somewhat more difficult trip to visit my family on weekends because of the extreme congestion on the Bay Bridge.
We haven’t re-established all the services we need close to our new home base, but enough to feel more or less at ease.
© Alexey Kondratev
ID 8616636 | Dreamstime.com
By this time four weeks from now we will have moved to a new place in
Alameda.
The preparations for taking possession of this condo are well on their way thanks to a whirlwind two weeks of activity. They tell us it’s a slow season for people hunting for a home because of the holidays and the rise in interest rates, so we haven’t had to compete with other people for the same properties.
© Publicdomainphotos
ID 102950205 | Dreamstime Stock Photos
A couple of years ago I was working for a company that allowed me to sit at
a desk in their office in midtown Manhattan in lieu of relocating all the way
across the country. It was still a kind of shock to adjust to the New York
style of life after so many years working for sedate firms in northern New
Jersey, with the commute by bus and the walk across Times Square and the
standing in line for lunch at one of the dozens upon dozens of eateries within
a short distance of the office, and the tech meetups around town. Now that the
economy was picking up after the shock of the late 00s there were plenty of
exciting things going on in the tech world, many of them right there in the
country’s heart of finance. Around then is when I first started hearing about
bitcoin when companies like Adafruit and
Overstock were beginning
to accept this cryptocurrency as payment for their merchandise. People had
even written phone apps which allow you to conduct transactions right from your
smartphone by then, which sounded both great and worrying considering the rise
of mobile phone dependence right around the same time. There were articles
describing how blockchain-based currencies could decentralize the global
monetary system independent of central banks, and help eliminate middlemen which
hinder micropayments. So, I decided I’d take
a small amount of money and find out where I could get my own stake in bitcoin.
I have been spending the majority of my time these last four weeks talking about
myself to people I don’t know. It isn’t something I would choose to do, but it
is a necessary part of the job interview gauntlet. I talk about what I’ve done,
and about things that have been done to me, and about what I thought I was
good at doing, and about what I wish I were better at. I talk about the times
when things went bad and what I did about them, and about the things where I
was happiest about the way things turned out, and talk about what I imagine I
might want to do in some hard to define near future. I talk about what people
have paid me and how much I want other people to pay me and I talk about how
many pieces of potential ownership in a particular company I don’t know that
well I might want to receive. I talk about where I have been and where I might
like to go and what I want to gain from going there. I have talked about the
food I could have to eat, the ways I could get to work, the merits of places I
don’t intend to visit. I have said things just to make the minute hand advance
when I felt like I didn’t want to talk any longer, and I have said things to
try to capture the attention of someone who seemed uninterested in having a
conversation. But mostly, I have been spending a lot of time talking about what
makes me different and how I got to where I was and how I might want to see
myself taking a path that is more or less similar to the one I have been
traveling recently, and it’s gotten to the point that I don’t completely know
what I’ve really done or what I want or why I’m doing what I’m doing
fundamentally.
I’ve been thinking for some time now of what I’d like to do once it’ll be no
longer viable to continue working in the tech industry. I’ve dropped out and
made my way back in, but do not have high hopes for being able to do that again
ten or more years closer to retirement age. I keep coming back to the idea of
making a radical change going into creative writing.
