Yeah. So. Hrumph. I had pictured this "rehab thing" as being fast-paced and exciting, kind of sexy and dangerous. But I just spent four hours on charts. There are over 150 houses in my assigned quadrant and I need to catalog the status of each house (Occupied, Vacant, For Sale, etc.) to get the lay of the land. That's what I was doing when I was driving around the neighborhood with my voice recorder a few days ago. Predictably, I didn't reliably record the disposition of most houses on that run, so I have to go back through. Sure, I do have evidence on my snotty, Valley Girl-accented recording that "any house that I don't idennnnntifyyyy is probably occupiiiied....7808 occupiiiied...7010 probably vacannnnnnt...7012 (sigh) ugly, but occupiiied..." and so on. Back at the office though, I couldn't trust my own snark, so I had to head back out to complete the job.
But what took four hours? Well, as I mentioned before, that plat map I had was barely legible, so I needed to search the web for a free plat map of my quadrant. A plat map, for the uninitiaated, is an overhead view of all the lots and streets in a given area. They look like schematics of piano keys (the lots) with straight and curvy streams cutting through them (the streets). These maps are rarely updated frequently enough to keep up with the shifting lot boundaries and addresses of a city that is constantly in the process of reinventing itself, so there are lots on the map that are not reflected on the street and vice versa. Free electronic plat maps are not easy to find. And when you do find one, it will not be easily manipulated to fit your 5 block area, so you have to fiddle with screen shots and cropping and the travails of printing on 11x17 paper. When you have done all of this, and drawn in the plats that were left off because youknowwhat?it'sfineandyoujustcan'ttakeanymore. The next step is to begin marking the map from a recording that makes you sound like one of those "Heathers" girls who deserved to be beaten to death with a mallet for the love of Christian Slater. It was so embarrassing that I shut my office door to keep other people from hearing the sound of my voice, which I suppose they hear all the time, but I can't really sound that obnoxious all the time, can I?
But what took four hours? Well, as I mentioned before, that plat map I had was barely legible, so I needed to search the web for a free plat map of my quadrant. A plat map, for the uninitiaated, is an overhead view of all the lots and streets in a given area. They look like schematics of piano keys (the lots) with straight and curvy streams cutting through them (the streets). These maps are rarely updated frequently enough to keep up with the shifting lot boundaries and addresses of a city that is constantly in the process of reinventing itself, so there are lots on the map that are not reflected on the street and vice versa. Free electronic plat maps are not easy to find. And when you do find one, it will not be easily manipulated to fit your 5 block area, so you have to fiddle with screen shots and cropping and the travails of printing on 11x17 paper. When you have done all of this, and drawn in the plats that were left off because youknowwhat?it'sfineandyoujustcan'ttakeanymore. The next step is to begin marking the map from a recording that makes you sound like one of those "Heathers" girls who deserved to be beaten to death with a mallet for the love of Christian Slater. It was so embarrassing that I shut my office door to keep other people from hearing the sound of my voice, which I suppose they hear all the time, but I can't really sound that obnoxious all the time, can I?
0 comments:
Post a Comment