UNANNOUNCED VISIT TO KILLEEN
DAILY HERALD
I asked Chaz how close of a drive
was Killeen ,
and he asked why would I even want to go to that crappy place. One of the
books I paginated was the Killeen Daily Herald, and they continuously had
problems getting the layout the way they wanted it. I suspected the root
cause was their point person communicating with Tribune’s person who wrote the
work orders, neither of which actually had hands-on dealing with the book’s
actual production. If it wasn’t too far, I thought it’d be fun to pop in
and say hi. It might make my job easier if I met my phone contact there
in person.
From where the house was in
northwest Austin (nearly the southern edge of Cedar Park), it would only be
about a 90 minute drive (including the time it’d take to get over to Interstate
35 to make the bulk of the trip). Chaz had some time off, so he was able
to be my chauffeur for this. We got a laugh as we saw a truck hauling
what appeared to be snowmobiles, and wondering where the hell would those be
used in the area. After we passed the truck, we realized those were
actually ski jets. Chaz didn’t know of any major lakes in the area (as
the city’s “Town Lake
My first impression of Killeen was that it’s a
rather unimpressive place. It was flat and brown, as opposed to the green
hills of Austin .
Even the section where the paper was located didn’t appear to be in the
best section of town. Because I’d brought the address with me, we’d been
able to print out the location from MapQuest, so that made our journey easy.
It was a bright sunny day, and Chaz didn’t mind waiting in the lobby as I
went inside. I didn’t expect this would take too long.
I asked the receptionist for my
Kristie (my contact), and she called her. I chuckled when I heard the
receptionist say “No, he’s not on the phone, but up here in the front.”
Kristie came out, and we did a formal greeting. I did let her know
I was down here on holiday, and this was about as unofficial visit as it could
get. Kristie escorted me in, and showed me around their production floor,
which was nice to see the process on their end. She also introduced me to
her manager, John, who was happy to see me. The three of us sat and
talked for about an hour. Seeing how the data was received and used on
the client end gave me some ideas on how better to prepare it on the provider
end, so I took a bunch of notes to bring back. A lot of brownie points
were scored here because I took this opportunity.
On the drive back to the house, we
noticed the traffic backed up a bit on the interstate. There were some
side roads which paralleled the highway for local use, called the frontage
roads. Those drivers who saw the delays soon enough exited the highways
for the frontage roads. Obviously some people were in quite a hurry, and
didn’t wait for an exit, as they simply drove across the grassy median.
As all the offenders were pick-up trucks, Chaz referred to that as a
Texas Off-Ramp.
A side note (no pun intended) about
the frontage roads here which I found quite different than what I was use to in
New York .
One, there are no such things as frontage roads. When you exit a NY
highway, you are deposited on a brand new street to access local things. New York highways are
designed to bypass most of the urban structures, as opposed to slice right
through them. Also, I’d seen frontage roads when driving to South Carolina years ago, and they didn’t work like they
did over here in Texas .
Also, any other highways I’ve ever been on, the traffic entering or
leaving the highway had to yield to the local traffic on the side roads.
Not here. The cars on the frontage roads had to stop to allow those
exiting (still usually going 60 miles an hour) to tear on by. That was a
good fact to keep in mind so we wouldn’t get creamed at an intersection where
we thought we had the right-of-way.
One additional note about the visit
to Killeen ; which I didn’t learn about until my
return to Glens Falls .
After my visit, John commented to someone at his office that he thought
it was really nice that someone cared enough to stop by. This was
communicated back to Tribune’s sales staff, who knew none of their people were
there, so they assumed the paper had been visited by our competitor(s).
Apparently this set off a firestorm of panic as to who’d visited this
client (which was in danger of not renewing Tribune’s service).
When I came back into the office
the following week, my manager (Rich) asked in a roundabout humorous way if I
happened to visit any place in particular while I was in Texas . I visited a lot of places,
Rich, what are you looking for specifically? He told me corporate sales
were all upset about someone who claimed to be from Tribune visiting the
Killeen Daily Herald, and they assumed it was from another business. I
told Rich what I did, and how a lot of ruffled feathers had been smoothed over
because of that (and all the work orders I’d be writing from the notes I took).
Rich got a good laugh out of it, because all the upper-level people had
gotten worked up over nothing.
DOWNTOWN AUSTIN
Chaz and I parked his car downtown,
so we could walk around the area a little. The other purpose of doing
that was so I could drop a resume off at Austin American-Statesman, as I
figured the local paper was a good place to start looking for a job (“Yes, I
can paginate anything you need me to do.”) We also spent a short time
wandering up and down the walking path next to the river (which was the “Town Lake
Close to the Statesman
building (on Congress Avenue )
was a modern art sculpture which was shaped like a giant bat. Chaz
explained there was a bat colony that lived somewhere in the city, hence the
“bat love” this place had, but he wasn’t sure where the roost was. Later
on during the week when we were downtown after dark, I was able to get a shot of
this.
Heading up Congress Avenue , Chaz and I walked
towards the state capitol, which looked suspiciously like the country’s
Capitol. Chaz noted it was made that way on purpose, as the original
white Texas
settlers were American homesteaders, and this was paying respect to the country
they left when they formed their own country.
There were a handful of people coming in and out of the building, but we
didn’t go inside, as the guards at the entrances gave us dirty stares when we
were looking at the place. I’m sure it was more post-9/11 paranoia, but
enough that we didn’t ask to go inside. In my previous experience I’d
seen New York ’s
state capitol was only open to visitors “by appointment,” so just assumed it
was so here too. We wandered around the grounds a bit, and noticed there
were a lot of statues and monuments displayed here. Normally this would
be stuff I’d take pictures of, but after the reception we got from the guards,
I put my camera away for the duration.
As we headed back down the street
to where we parked, I could see elements of how the city’s motto of “Keep
Austin Weird” had come about, from strangely-colored trees to the occasional
oddly-painted car. There were also street people playing instruments for
money, and some beggars looking for hand-outs, which was no different than any
other large city I’d ever been in. I stopped within one of the stores to
buy a couple shirts and souvenirs to bring back. This was where I got the
second of the post-cards I’d sent to Pete.
MORNING STAR
This is more of a continuation of
interesting things noticed in downtown Austin ,
but it was funny enough that it deserved its own entry. Chaz and I had
gone to dinner (Brian wasn’t feeling well that night), and we’d headed over to
this “good Mexican place” he’d heard about. Chaz commented there were two
places with similar-sounding names that were next to each other. We
pulled into Pappadeaux’s, and found it was a 45 minute wait. Since the
other place, Pappasito’s, was right up the road, we’d go over there to see what
the wait time was. Since there was only a hotel in between the two
places, I suggested that we just walk across the hotel’s lawn to get to Pappasito’s,
instead of moving the car. Pappasito’s ended up having a five minute
wait, and that was the place we were looking for initially (Pappadeaux’s was a
Cajun seafood place).
After dinner coming back to the
car, it was now dark. I stood for a few moments at the edge of the
hotel’s lawn, which had the busy frontage road in front of it (no sidewalk).
It was just interesting to be this close to an interstate, since the
major highways in New York
generally circumvented the cities. I also wondered how many drunk people
stumbled across the lawn and into traffic.
As we headed back to the house,
Chaz commented there was a gaming & comic store called Dragon’s Lair that
he’d heard about, but hadn’t gotten to yet. He thought it was on a
particular road, so he wanted to see if he could locate where it was. Didn’t
make a lot of sense at the time, since being after 9 pm, it would
most-certainly be closed. We drove down
the road, and looked on either side in an attempt to see if we could spot it.
After passing a number of blocks, we were sure it must be on a different
road. Chaz then was looking for a place to turn around, when I happened
to look in the right direction and spotted Dragon’s Lair.
When we found a place to pull into
so Chaz could do his three-point turn, I noticed something else. Since we
were in parking lot, he could stop a moment as I pulled my camera to
quickly snap a picture of a blue neon upside-down cross with the words “Morning
Star” written across it. Was it a Satanic church? With all the
weird stuff that could be in Austin, who knows what this could’ve been.
We didn’t go further to investigate, only because the section of the town
didn’t look the safest, thus we weren’t going to stay parked for very long.
Later investigation in the daylight
showed the neighborhood was old, but not bad as it originally appeared, and
that “Morning Star” was a tattoo parlor. Still it was something which
gave us an amusing chuckle until we saw what it really was.
For current information on the places visited (or mentioned):
Austin American-Statesman: http://www.statesman.com/
Keep Austin Weird: http://www.keepaustinweird.com/home.html
Pappadeaux’s Seafood Kitchen: http://www.pappadeaux.com/home/
Pappasito’s Catina: http://pappasitos.com/home/
Dragon’s Lair: http://dlair.net/austin/
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Sounds like a great trip! How soon after this did you move to Texas?
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