I need to rid myself of some items in preparation for moving. They are:
Queen-size bed with mattress
Small rolling night stand (IKEA)
Wardrobe-type thingy (IKEA)
Thin, tall cabinet (IKEA - still in box)
Small file cabinet
Nominally these are all free, but more accurately the cost for each is the time taken out of your day to come get it, plus whatever mechanism you use for transportation. There is also the stipulation that my effort involve nothing more than letting the taker into my apartment. I may even lean against a wall and sip ice-cold lemonade during the process.
If there are no takers in the next couple weeks I will hock them on Craigslist.
When a cute girl asks whose side you take in the Jay Z vs. Nas rap feud of the late 1990's, "Will Smith" is the wrong answer. He is not, as you thought, the "Switzerland of MCs".
Someone once told me that he or she wasn't sure I'd enjoy any job where I couldn't show my friends what I was doing, specifically that I was driven by the cultural impact of my work instead of pure problem-solving. The jury is still out. If cultural impact serves as a measure of a particular problem well solved then I don't think the tandem is extricable, and the question at hand is whether the societal reverberations themselves satisfy you* beyond as a solution for the problem to which they are tied. I'm not sure they do for me, but again, it is perhaps too early to tell.
Whether the prime motivator or not, the problems I have attempted to solve professionally have typically had some cultural impact component, though I have not exactly been a one-man PR machine in making them heard. But since:
the events of the Virginia Tech shooting have elevated the level of attention on what I do
I'll be leaving my job soon (moving to London for a couple years)
BBC News has always held a soft spot in the anglophile recesses (see also #2) of my heart
I've decided to link to this article about my employer and specifically one of the products I've spent a lot of time working on over the past year. So there.
*In my Grand Unified Taxonomy of Life there are two main motivators for work - necessity and personal satisfaction - and I have the luxury to be more worried about the latter. Whether one is a subset of the other, and exactly which is subsume-er and which subsume-ee, crosses a very deliberately instated personal blog embargo against ontological onanism.
