"The News from Moscow" or "What Once Was"

This is much better if you read it in Garrison Keilor's voice.  Actually, everything is...

Well, it's been a quiet week in Moscow, Idaho, my home town, out on the edge of the Palouse.  The students are back after what seems like an unseasonably short summer break.  Less than three months ago, they packed up their dorm rooms and apartments and loaded their earthly possessions into uhauls (or the family horse trailer) and took off.  Most of them couldn't hie out of here fast enough, they high fived their friends and hit the gas, headed for the parents' house, summer jobs and laziness, and the promise of a hot sun to bake under.  It reminds me of the summer of 2001, when I had finished my third year of college, and I was closing in on a degree in geography.  This would prove to be folly later on, but at the time I was going to light the world on fire with my map making.  That summer was my internship, 10 dollars an hour working at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.  It was supposed to be the launching pad to a high paying career in the fast paced world of computer mapping, the real rat race.  Geographers are known the world over for their hard living so you can see the attraction.  

I found that summer that it wasn't the ideal job, in the sense that it required me to wake up at ungodly hours like 6 am, and to input numbers into an Excel spreadsheet for 10 hours at a time, I had been lied to.  It also required that I live in Idaho Falls for three months, a prospect that I seemed OK with at the time, but now I doubt I could stomach.  Not that I have anything against the town, but by this time I had been acclimatized to Moscow, it's a different life.  But I also found that despite a full adult workweek I had plenty of downtime, and so went in search of a second summer job to fill my hours and my pockets.

What I came up with was Yen Ching, Idaho Falls' newest Chinese eatery.  I couldn't even tell you if it's still open, but I can say with certainty that it was about the strangest business I've ever been a part of.  YC was owned by Chinese people.  The cooks were Mexican.  The wait staff were high school age girls, all, of course, with boyfriends serving their Mormon missions.  And I was the 21 year old delivery driver.  It would make a great sitcom, and I think we'd have to call it "Chinese Checkers."  

Monday through Thursday from 7 to 6 I typed numbers into a computer, and Friday through Sunday and some weeknights I delivered Chinese food to the hungry people of Idaho Falls.  This is the kind of thing you do as a student on summer break, and so it's no wonder that they're so excited to get back to Moscow, and that's what they've done this past week.  First came the freshman, new students desperate to get away from their parents and assert their independence but scared to death to be on their own.  Their parents bring them en masse, parking haphazardly all across Moscow, in the middle of the street sometimes, seemingly just to get in my way as I drive around in my unmistakable purple cable van.  A few days later the upperclassmen come back and move into their new apartments, which are just now recovering from the last battle with the student body.  Many of them are first time renters, and for most of them this is the day they realize that they need TV service, and more importantly Internet.  So they call the good people at Time Warner, not realizing that ten thousand people just like them moved into the area within a few days, and therefore not understanding why it would take two or even three weeks for a technician to come and install these services.  And so even though we're ready for it, we know they're coming, we still end up in the same position every year.  Working the dreaded ten hour day, 15 technicians doing nothing but installing Internet and TV for people who may or may not go to class on the second day because of my work.  This is the life that we lead here in Moscow, as the days turn into increasingly cold nights and the students begin to look forward to the next break.  It's been one week of school and they're already looking ahead to Thanksgiving.  And right now I'm everyone's favorite person; in a month I'm just the cable guy.  But hey, it's a living.

That's the news from Moscow, where all the women are too young, all the men are saucy, and all the children are hippies.

rossnation... out.