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fri posted: Fri 2022-04-08 17:48:11 tags: n/a
1. Housing hunt recap:
It was pretty disheartening when we hunted for apts in Chapel Hill last year. That area was even pricier than Cary/Apex. Nickel-and-diming is running rampant with pet fees, pet rent, inflated application fees, nonrefundable cash-grab fees ("administrative", "redecoration"... whatever), "concierge" trash pickup that you can't opt out of (whether the concierges actually show up and take your trash consistently or not), etc. Plus The Great COVID Stimulus Give-Away And Interest Rate Bonanza tilted the housing market heavily in sellers' favor nationwide, plus the Triangle just keeps adding jobs faster than housing.

So when Mrs spotted a "for rent" sign across from a Trulia listing she was checking into, early last week, we were getting desperate for a decent balance of affordability, proximity to work, and not a roach-and-mold ghetto special. As luck would have it, the price was great; landlords are just people, not a corporation; close to work, walking trails, and shopping/dining; no sharing hallways and elevators with anti-masker belligerents.

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2. I'm finding it a whole lot easier to be punctual. Part of that is because subcontractors are getting paid timely - but really more like even if they weren't, my days wouldn't be polluted with their irate calls, because that front-line emotional labor of soothing them has been properly shifted from the financial office to the operations (vendor support and relations) part of the business.

Another crucial factor is that I feel like I have a genuine mandate that I didn't really have before, because there was pressure to keep the department staffed on the lean side so we were mostly just reacting to an endless pipeline of emerging issues. -The mandate being, to leverage technology to improve process speed and accuracy. I get to actually use my technical skills, I have leeway to try out tools that rank-and-file wouldn't normally be thinking about. Developing software is absolutely a creative occupation. It's close to the heart of that magic Venn diagram where I love it, I'm good at it, I'm paid for it. Whether "the world needs it" is debatable; certainly there are areas where the world needs work more than here.