Fool.com: Moving To Atlanta</font> (Fribble) July 2, 1998

Thursday, July 02, 1998

Moving To Atlanta
By George Runkle TMF Runkle

This past week I accepted a job in Atlanta, Georgia. I have to admit I got a little frightened about taking the job in Atlanta after an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal, describing Atlanta's problems with traffic, urban sprawl, and air pollution. However, I realized the same thing could be written about any major city in the United States, or actually on Earth. Really, you could do a search and replace with any city name and the article would fit. In the end, I didn't worry about it.

Now, before I started work here in Pittsburgh, I'd never been to this city. I'd been out to see my sister in Beaver County, but that's pretty far away so it doesn't count. I've actually been to Atlanta; I worked there one summer nineteen years ago. I was working in the area bounded by the city prison farm, the landfill, and the Intrenchment Creek sewage treatment plant. It wasn't the most fragrant place on a hot July afternoon. I stayed in a motel on Stewart Avenue, which is probably making those of you in Atlanta groan right now. Stewart Avenue is entertaining, but it was hard to sleep with all the people coming in and out of the motel, accompanied by ladies of the evening.

In spite of all this, I'm still going to Atlanta. Every city has traffic, sewage treatment plants, well, maybe not a prison farm, but they all have their versions of Stewart Avenue. No other city in the world has Coca-Cola Headquarters, though. Was this the reason I decided to move there? I don't think we're talking about that right now.

I am kind of nervous. What if my house here in Pittsburgh doesn't sell? Now, I'm being very scientific about getting it on the market. We have a top realtor, and my son and I buried St. Joseph in the backyard. The first time I heard about this, I thought it was a bit disrespectful. Would you want to be buried upside down? On top of that, I kind of like St. Joseph. Not much is written about him, but the little bit that is indicates he was a decent guy. He seems like the kind of guy who would be happy to lend you his weed whacker if you needed it. Of course they didn't have weed whackers 2,000 years ago, but that's a minor point. If they did, he would have certainly been happy to lend it out. Carpenters are usually pretty decent people, at least all the ones I know are. Anyway, burying him isn't considered disrespectful, so I figured it was all right.

Now my statue wasn't really St. Joseph, my only statue of him is with the Christmas stuff in the attic. We used a Star Wars action figure. Nobody knows what St. Joseph looked like anyway, and the statues of him just can't be accurate. Here the guy is a carpenter, and he's never wearing a tool belt. He always has these soft hands, and this is in the days before power saws, nail guns, electric sanders, and cordless screwdrivers. Also, how's a guy from the Mid-East that works construction keep such fair skin? No way. I'd bet the action figure looks more like him; of course I doubt St. Joseph wore trousers or carried a blaster pistol.

I'm not sure if I have St. Joseph buried in the right place. I always thought he went in front of the house, by the "For Sale" sign. The realtor insisted he goes in the backyard, my wife says he should be on the north side of the house. I put him in the garden by the tomato plants; most carpenters I know have a tomato garden anyway. We'll see how this works.

Moving from one city is altogether exciting, scary, and risky. A lot of things can go wrong, but to me it is always fun to go somewhere new. What makes this move different is Foolishness. We have no credit card debt, but we do have investments. We have learned to budget our income and avoid bleeding money. I also have St. Joseph in my garden. In the end, I feel we'll do fine, and I'm looking forward to meeting all the Fools in Atlanta.