So several years ago I used to work for Excite@Home. Except when I was hired there, they were called “iMall”; our e-commerce operation was one of many acquisitions in the years prior to @Home’s demise.
Anyway, I used to make the daily drive to go work for Steve Fulling and Phil Windley. It wasn’t too bad: an hour and fifteen minutes from my house, sixty-six miles each way, driven lovingly on back roads from my home in Tooele, UT to Orem.
I have an interview with a company in Provo, just slightly south of Orem, on Thursday, so I decided to follow my usual routine and make sure to stake out the building in advance. Really, it’s so that I can be sure I find the place; the only thing worse than my sense of appropriate comedic timing is my sense of direction. Anyway, I made the drive from Salt Lake City, to Provo to check out this enormous campus. I mean, enormous. I know, people from back East will think our little large companies are laughable, but this would be, by far, the largest company I’d worked for if I am hired.
Anyway, so I discovered that, in the intervening years, the little back country road I took every day to work has now become a gridlocked, bumper-to-bumper, torn-up main street. There are thousands of homes now where there used to be fields of potatoes and other vegetables. In the verdant valley I used to pass through without noticing much development, the community of Eagle Mountain has encroached half the mountain side.
A part of me mourned the serene country ride I’d never have again.
And a bigger part of me wanted to move to one of the new houses if I do get this job. They are big, and inexpensive, and closer to my work than I am now.
Ever find yourself on that same kind of mental path? Remembering the way things were, wishing they were still that way, and yet being glad for change because it keeps life fresh and interesting?
Aside from the gridlock, though. That’s boring.
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
Dude, Borne Back Ceaselessly!
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaseleslly into the past.”
If I fall into Fitzgerald’s anachronistic warning, and continue to live my life in the hopes of the past, then I fail to grow as a human being. I like to expand and learn and move forward, all the time. Otherwise, I’m just getting stale.
On the same token, I hate traffic. HATE IT. Mainly for the same reason as above. If you’re sitting in a line, then you’re doing just that: sitting in a line. Life is too short to endure stagnation by sitting in a line behind other people.
Word up.
We bought our house with the
We bought our house with the job i had at that time in mind. It was relatively close, and the housing was a very good “bang-for-the-buck”. My job has changed a few times due to the whole IT rollercoaster. I work off-site for the current company at a government facility in Falls Church, VA. It is roughly 64 miles door to door. The traffic in this area is so insane that a matter of 10 minutes can mean all the difference in the world. My normal commute time is about 1 hour 30 minutes. One of the unfortunate factors about me driving in myself is that i am unable to take advantage of the HOV around here, which when i have used it cuts about 30 or so minutes off.
I completely agree though with the idea that it is sad to see so much of the surrounding farms get “colonized” with housing, but on the flip side of that I wouldn’t be in the house that i am in now if it wasn’t for that very same growth.
Farm land…what farm land…
When I was 19, I worked at the Hilton Hotel (now a Marriott) in Gaithersburg. My drive from Damascus to Gaithersburg was nothing. There was a little traffic but nothing much. When you get to the end of Rt.27 and Rt 355, there was a stop sign. Everyone had to take their turn. This was the reason for the ‘traffic’. Keep in mind this was about 14 years ago. The area was a huge farm land called Henderson’s corner..for some unknown reason that I am sure that my grandparents told me a hundred times. There was a little country store on the corner not far from this intersection. Where the country store once stood is now a mobile/exxon gas station. The farm land is now a huge shopping center and housing development…expensive might I add.
It is sad to see what land we have turned into a development that will cost as little as $450,000. That is supposed to be a bargin. Not according to my checking account. That is why I still live in the country, unfortunately, not in Damascus anymore but in Fredneck…I mean Frederick.
Jon
I hear ya! I live in Germantown, Kel works in Arlington, and now they’ve closed her entrance from GW pkwy. Arg! Glad I work in Rockville! 😉
JT