I am nearing the end of my long daily commute from Philadelphia to New York City. The end result hasn’t been too bad, although over the past six months the daily hour and a half commute has worn on me at times. My journey started when I took my current position at Stack Exchange as a Systems Administrator in their New York offices.
My first inclination was to move up there ASAP which, looking back would probably have been the better idea even if I was losing sleep over the stress finding a place in NYC in about a week was causing me. The journey for me began when I accepted the position, I gave my notice at $evil_corporation excited to start in on an adventure at a hot VC funded startup. Of course I started looking for a place, hit up my sister for advice (since she has lived in NYC since she went away to college). I thought I had everything set, spent the week lining up apartments to look at during the week between knowledge dump session. I then intrepidly headed up to NYC for the weekend to look at these places. I had 13 apartments lined up to look at over the course of a weekend.
I figured I would surely find a place that would work during that time. The first rude awakening that told me the NYC real estate market was nothing like what I was used to was when I woke up Saturday morning to find that 8 of the places where no longer available. Wow.
The second realization was that Manhattan apartments where … small, very very small. Although, oddly I was OK with this. I figured if I was going to move to NYC I wanted to be in the center of it all – at least for a year or two – while I’m still young enough to appreciate it. So, feeling a little bit depressed at not having found a place, and stressed out that I only had one week between my last day at my old job, and my first day at my new job I sat down and decided that it would be best to commute for a little while. I was thinking that this would only last a few months at first but that has transformed into six months at this point!
I have survived the commute now with the help of a few gadgets – and being a geek would you expect anything less?
* Laptop with cellular modem
* iPod
* Noise Supressing headphones
* Kindle
Being able to listen to music, read, serf the internet – and occationall do some work on the train was a great help in me keeping my sanity during these long commutes to and from New York.
Now that I have gotten a place in NYC, and will be moving up in the next few weeks I’ll miss my life in Philly but i’m looking forward to starting anew in NYC.