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So there I was, Madame Editor, sitting at my desk, minding my own business, not messing with anybody. And there she was, our office property manager, smiling sweetly, waving a paper in my face. A baaaaad paper.
Under California law, when a commercial property is purchased at a mortgage default sale (as was our entire office complex), the buyer has the legal right to up the rents, cancel long-term leases at will, and wreak havoc in the lives of small businesses. The paper being waved was a three-day notice-to-quit. Translated, it said, “You have 72 hours to move your entire operation and vacate the 5200 square feet you occupy in this building we just purchased. We don’t care how difficult or impossible this is – just get out.” In short, John Cooke, nice guy that he is, good work that he does, was being bounced!
Our apologies to those of you who may have been inconvenienced by the confusion of this past month. If you telephoned our office on Tuesday, 10/29, the phone company had the wrong recording programmed, “The number you have called has been disconnected or is no longer in service….” And if your mail arrived that Tuesday or Wednesday, the post office hadn’t processed the forwarding order yet and returned some mail marked “Moved, left no address.” Seventy-two hour forced moves are not easy, and the smiling property manager, adding insult to injury, says, “Security deposit? You want your $2,500 security deposit? Well, gee, you’ll have to get it from the previous owner via the bankruptcy court.”
Anyway, all this aside, apologies to those inconvenienced or frightened into believing that John Cooke had bit the dust. We’re alive and well, busier than ever, and ensconced in new quarters. We now live in a 5-inch-by-12-inch-by-16-inch box (tight quarters, but at least we know that nobody’s gonna force us to vacate in 72 hours again!) at the local post office.
Next: Please note our new address (PO Box 4847, Orange, CA 92863), new phone number (714-289-7777) and new fax number (714-289-7701) and correct your records.
Finally, we’ve returned to a single section paper. By changing our font size slightly and by changing our layout a lot, we’ve managed to cram just as much into this expanded single section as we did with two. Hopefully this will eradicate the problems of misplaced sections (“Your page one article says it continues on page 32, but there are only 24 pages in this paper….”) that occur with surprising frequency and generally entail over a hundred special mailings an issue. In fact, we’ve even encountered situations in which we get two calls in a single day from the same company. Guess what? Investigator “A” has the first section and asks us to mail the second section – then, a few hours later (and moments after the mail has gone out) investigator “B” calls to say he has the second section and wants us to mail the first section.
And then my head hurts almost as much as it did when the wickedly smiling property manager handed over that nasty little piece of paper.
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