Zemblan Grammar

I don’t know if I have described exactly what I do at the temp job here, mainly because it’s kind of spotty and changes from day to day.  Right now, though, after having finished the project in which I was completely anal about other people’s penmanship (sigh. I know.), I am doing some work with our company’s property files–we own practically half of this town, I am finding out.  Some of the files go back decades, and I get so absorbed in the stories told by the various collected documents. 

I can’t tell you how many files I’ve read where families, often immigrant families, start their own businesses and fail within two years.  Two years is pretty long, for some of them.  The files always contain an ebulliently optimistic business plan promising to take advantage of Location! Location! Location! and Foot Traffic!  Letters dated only a few months later reveal that things aren’t going as well as planned, and they’re really sorry the rent is past due.  Will they renew the lease for another year?  Will they have to break the lease midway through when the business is forced to close?  It’s so common, and always so sad.  I always wonder; if I had only eaten lunch there more often. 

Then there are files that just raise more questions: mysterious fires, the paperwork for which is cross-filed in a now non-existent folder; a blank piece of notebook paper with four keys taped to it; a document that has been seventy percent blacked out with sharpie marker and that seems outwardly to have nothing to do with the file it lives in.  Sometimes I try to solve these mysteries, poking around in the archives looking for those cross-files or holding that blacked-out page up to the light to try to make sense of the ghostly words lurking under all that ink. 

The other day I read through an especially fascinating one:  a retiree in her nineties and her husband were living in a house we own and they had been for forty-some-odd years.  Their rent was ridiculously low based on an unofficial rent-control-type situation, and the house needed about $15,000.00 in repairs.  As you can guess, we were hard at work behind the scenes thinking of some way to kick Grandma and Grandpa out of their house, and not only that, but we were also discussing ways in which this might be done so that the city wasn’t clued in about it in time to try to have the house declared a historical site (a famous Zemblan had lived there years before).  I cast my memory about my mental map of the city, and remembered that the only thing on that block, these days, is a parking garage. It seems we succeeded.

I probably oughtn’t poke my nose in this sort of thing, and I’m sure I oughtn’t write about it, but hey; that’s just how I roll.  All those years of watching Alias have gone to my head.  Unlike Alias and unlike my usual detective work, unfortunately, this involves neither fantastic wigs nor whiskey.