Facebook memories reminded me this morning that today, February 1st, is the anniversary of the founding of Diamond Comic Distributors in 1982. I hadn’t yet turned nine.
There were photos in my memories of the 40th-anniversary in 2022, when the office was essentially closed due to COVID…
…and of the gift we received for the 35th-anniversary in 2017…
I may still have that Steve Geppi Minimates figure, though it’s possible I tossed it in late 2022 when I cleaned out and packed up my office at Diamond HQ. The company decided to go permanent work-from-home and reduced office space in early 2023. I still have an office at Diamond HQ, but it’s now on the other end of the building, in the C-Suite area.
All these places still exist, though. The entrance no longer has the Batman and Spider-Man statues. Linked above is another 2022 photo, of a pillar with a poster and a group of cubicles with office doors beyond. All still there. The 2017 photo shows my cubicle at the time — I moved into an office at the end of the year — and that cubicle is still there. Diamond downsized, but the commercial real estate market is terrible, and everything in that part of the building is still as it was. I sometimes walk through it — there are doors, but they’re not locked, and my key card still gives me access to its stairwells — when I leave for the day; I still park where I did, on top of the parking deck on the north end of the building, and I’ll take a walk through what were the CS-Tech, Customer Service, and Sales departments, passing by where Marketing had been, on my way out the door. I even make a game of how far I can get into the old offices without the lights coming on. Usually they come on when I reach where the Customer Service printer had been, but I have made it almost all the way to the elevators.
In a way it feels like Aliens; like Hadley’s Hope, everything feels almost normal, but something’s just a little bit… off. There’s furniture. Some desks still have posters. There are cork boards and whiteboards. There are cords, even some computer equipment. There’s an odor of dust, but it feels otherwise like people have just stepped out.
At some point, I won’t be able to walk through the old offices anymore.
With the bankruptcy, today may be Diamond’s last anniversary. There was no email from Steve Geppi on Friday marking the anniversary, as has been common in years past. I don’t expect one Monday.
The future is uncertain. We carry on.
I look at old photos from the office that captured part of my work monitor, I see the number of icons, and I cringe. I was just as bad at home, too, when I started working hybrid in 2020.
Linux has really made me a desktop minimalist.
Clean! No icons!
It’s Linux Mint, but with an Ubuntu-ish panel layout, top and left, using the Orchis theme and Tela icons. The wallpaper comes from the forthcoming game, Tales of the Shire. The artwork is pretty, but I don’t have anything on which to play the game, though I suppose I could install Steam. I haven’t bought a game in years…
Subtle and restrained the signage in the window of the York County Republican Party headquarters is not.
I had to mentally diagram that sentence to work out the right verb. And I despise diagramming sentences.