There's No Place Like Office

Laptop, desktop, Underwood or pencil. Do you budget based on book sales, or do you just go for it? What’s your dream office look like?

by Paul D. Marks

(Note: We received another notice from SoCal Edison that they might turn our power off for “Potential Public Safety Power Shutoff.” So if I don’t respond to your comments that’s why, but know they are appreciated. And don’t get me started on this crap!)

Pepper and Buster in my office.

All of the above…at one time or another. Well, not really an Underwood, though I did play on them as a kid at my dad’s business. And I have one in my office for its nostalgia value. It might come in handy with all the “preventative” power outages here… But I did write a lot of things on a portable Smith-Corona typewriter and then an IBM Selectric. The latter certainly seemed like a major move in the technology of the world. You could actually swap out that little ball and put in an italic font so itals would be in, uh, itals. Though at the time most people still wanted things that should ultimately appear in italics to be underlined.

The old Underwood in my office.

But then came the PC. And I’m one of the first people I know to have gotten a personal computer. My then-writing partner got an IBM clone (remember those?) and I thought, how silly…until I went over to his house and saw that he could move a paragraph from page 27 of a script to page 8 in a flash. And I was a hooked. So I got a Leading Edge computer with 2 floppies, the 5 ¼” kind—(remember those?). You’d have the program on one disc and your files on another and they didn’t hold much. Eventually, I swapped out one of the floppy drives for a  hard disc. I don’t remember how big it was, but suffice to say it was not very big and in that instance size matters.

A Leading Edge 2 floppy disc computer (not mine, but similar).

When we lived in our previous house I had a nice office setup with a good desktop computer…but I didn’t use it much because it was overlooking the street and we had some crazy and noisy neighbors across the street—think the Glossners from The Middle only worse. So I would do most of my writing at the breakfast table on a laptop. Besides, the view was better on that side of the house. But once we moved into our current house I’m back to writing on a desktop and I prefer it. I like the big, ergonomic keyboard and the big screen. I know you can hook both those things up to a laptop, but still…

Glossner

And if I budgeted based on sales I’d be using the old stub of a pencil that my clarinet teacher used to use to markup sheet music. What I do use is a very fast computer with lots of memory because I always have a lot of windows open. Several Word windows and usually a ton (and I mean a ton) of Chrome tabs and even several Chrome windows. Most of those have things that I want to read but that I often never get around to. But if I bookmark them I know I’ll never go to them, because out of sight, out of mind. And I figure if I have them open I might stumble on one and actually read it. They’re all things of interest to me, but I just don’t have the time to read everything I want to. But now that computer’s getting a little long in the tooth—gotta sell some more books.

My office, looking about as neat as it gets.

Sometimes I’ll take the laptop outside and work there. But inevitably there’s something I need in the house—like a drink—and being the lazy slob I am it’s easier to get if I’m already in the house.
My dream office is like the cockpit on a plane, everything within reach—most everything anyway. And my wife call’s the chair I sit in the Captain’s Chair. It’s a comfortable chair that’s ergonomically designed. As I sit in it for hours on end I need something that won’t break my back.  I’m in command central.

My ultimate dream office would be on a boat or an island with a fantastic view of the ocean. That said, I’m pretty happy with my current office. Yes, it’s a cluttered mess, but that’s not its fault it’s mine. And I do have that old Underwood here, a nice view and everything close at hand, including a couple of terrific dogs.

How ’bout you?

~.~.~

And now for the usual BSP:


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