\t\t\t\tThat’s not really his name, but i had a surprising and interesting
\nconversation with Ben at the Costco today. I was buying a pack of steaks,
\nsome printer paper, and a hard drive when I took a big Tower Records bag
\nout of my backpack. I have that old bag in my closet, among other bags,
\nnot so much as a relic from my days of working at the record store but
\njust because it’s a handsome and sturdy bag. Costco does not provide bags
\nfor your purchases, so when I go there I bring whatever size bag I think
\nwill suit the purchase I intend to make. Today I brought the old Tower
\nRecords bag, with the red plastic handles, that icon of commerce once
\nknown on these streets as the “Manhattan Suitcase.” I remember thinking as
\nI brought it out today that this thing must be a collector’s item by now.<\/p>\n
So as I was about to purchase the steaks, the printer paper, and the hard
\ndrive, one of the Costco associates spotted my bag and said “Wow, I
\nhaven’t seen one of those in … years.” He said that he used to work at
\nTower, and i told him I did, too, in 1991. It turned out he worked there
\nat that same time, for about 6 or 7 years, in the LP section at the
\nLincoln Center 66th Street location. I could not remember him no matter
\nhow hard I tried, but that didn’t surprise me, since there were several
\ndepartments with which I never interacted, and the daytime staff versus
\nthe night staff was different, and they rarely interacted.<\/p>\n
It was pretty surprising, though, to suddenly find myself remembering all
\nthose faces and names, shooting names at him and him remembering every
\none, and then some. He seemed to know a lot about everyone there,
\nincluding J., the girl I dated for 6 or 8 months while working there. He
\ndoes not know what happened to her, either, and she is the one whose fate
\nwould most interest me, just out of morbid curiosity. Then he told me that
\nthe place got robbed by a couple of disgruntled ex-employees, and that one
\nof the girls nearly got killed in the melee. I had never heard about that.
\nI asked him if it was in the papers. He said no, but when i got home I
\nfound a story about it in the Times from 1995. Ben said that that incident
\nwas the last straw for him, and that he had to move on from that place.
\nI said that yeah, I reached a point where I had to move on, too. He moved
\non to Costco, I moved on to corporate. As I walked home I remarked to
\nmyself that needless to say, when I worked at Tower I wasn’t buying steaks
\nlike these. Barharhar…<\/p>\n
After a suitable amount of gossip and memories we parted ways, but not
\nbefore he said “The Manhattan Suitcase!” I said “I was just about to say
\nthat. Your read my mind!” Much laughter. The Tower bag turned out to be
\nquite the conversation piece. I bet if I walked around town with it more
\noften all kinds of Tower alumni would rise from the crowds of peoples.<\/p>\n
…..<\/p>\n
There is a hard drive shortage in the world today. Costco is only selling
\n2 at a time to customers, on account of the flooding in Thailand. I bought
\none today, and one last week, as preliminary planning for the next phase
\nof redundancy. i seem to have forgotten that the RAID includes an
\nautomated backup regimen for external drives, meaning i plug in a USB
\ndrive and a backup of selected things automatically commences, and when it
\ndecommences i would take said drive to remote storage. hah, remote, as in
\n1 mile away. very remote. i just get nervous sometimes when i imagine
\nlosing those months and months worth of scanning. in the past i would try
\nto do this by dragging and dropping a terrabyte or 2 of stuff from one
\ndrive to another, but that technique is not very robust. the backup
\nprotocols seem more stable. if only i could run a remote storage facility
\nwirelessly, and without electricity. hooyeah, i am a visionary.<\/p>\n
…..<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
That’s not really his name, but i had a surprising and interesting conversation with Ben at the Costco today. I was buying a pack of steaks, some printer paper, and a hard drive when I took a big Tower Records bag out of my backpack. I have that old bag in my closet, among other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/saumAn-ben","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13328\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}