You've seen them before -- they have the sign which says "God Bless. Every little bit helps." There are more of them in my neighborhood every day. Today I saw one which perfectly captured the Bush Crash.
His sign said "Will work for Chocolate Chip Cookies."
Obviously, from looking at him, he hadn't been homeless long -- his face wasn't weathered enough, and his clothes were too clean. More than that, in my neck of the woods, there haven't been visible beggars in years; the trickle down from MSFT has been too rich. But now, even the might Mister Softie is laying people off, and, where it isn't doing that, it's cutting back on contractor hirings, and generally tightening its belt. Things aren't too bad for most blue badges, at least among the SDE's, but the pain is definitely spreading through the rest of the community.
Chocolate chip cookie guy is a new sign of those hard times.
This diary is about a dirtier measure of how rocky these times are, though. Follow me over the jump for more...
Me, I left Microsoft back in 2006, and went to work for somebody else. As a result, the family and I have been able to do some improvements in the yard this summer, specifically by building a few new retaining walls. If you've never done it, building a retaining wall is mechanically difficult, but theoretically easy -- you take a set of heavy objects, and stack them up, typically canting slightly backwards, and you put a lot of weight behind them so they don't fall over.
Cheap and lazy builders just backfill with sand. It's easy to move around, and you can fill any visible cracks with it, which makes hiding flaws easy. Better builders backfill with tumbled stone, and then cover the gravel with a several inch thick layer of topsoil. You get better drainage, more foundational stability, and less settling behind the wall; all good things. That's the way we do them.
So several months ago, the family project manager -- that'd be my spouse -- called up a local stone and cement company (Cadman, if you're interested), and ordered two tons of tumbled stone. That's the smallest order they'll accept, and it's a tiny, retail batch to them. It was delivered first thing the next day...in a truck driven by the dispatcher herself. To say I was surprised understates the case -- Cadman's a huge operation, and they are typically quite busy. Frankly, our order should have been a bit of an imposition.
Then we ordered the blocks we used for the wall itself from a local home improvement store (Lowe's). Those came as a solo delivery, twelve hours after we ordered them. We were the first delivery of the morning (8am, sharp)...and the truck left our place to go back to the store.
Then we built the walls. They're quite pretty, in my opinion, and I'm sure the fact that I assembled them by hand has nothing to do with my judgment. And finally, this morning, my spouse ordered the topsoil, from yet another supplier, Northwest Topsoil.
It was delivered three hours later.
So we got surprisingly good customer service. "What are you complaining about?", you ask. Here's the deal. In normal times, these places are busy. It's a horrible sign for the local building trades that they're not. My dirty story about the current rocky times shows that even here, in a very prosperous part of the nation, the recession is still biting deep into people's pocketbooks and wallets.