But they were at least limited in their portability and loudness and battery life. Now you can have a tiny speaker that gives up any semblance of sound quality for loudness, but will also manage to last 8+ hours.

So far, no ghosts yet! Only haunted by the vague odor of the church it was in before, so it kind of smells like an old lady’s house, but it’s going away pretty quickly.

I went on the low side since it’s not in perfect shape and is an older (1985) Young-Chang built Wurlitzer. It was a church piano so it has some bushing wear in the keys, but still very playable, and had a broken string on D2 that was an easy $50 fix. I think after moving, tuning, the string, and eventually rebushing it in the next year or so, I’ll have about $900-1000 into it all said and done. Still definitely a pretty inexpensive piano overall, but understandable why they might not have wanted to put money into something that was probably a donation to begin with.

A $1 grand piano off of eBay. I had been looking around on stuff like FB Marketplace for a “real” piano after learning with a really basic keyboard for a while, and happened across a gorgeous 6’1" grand piano on eBay. It was reasonably close, the ad said it was in good working order, and they took very detailed pictures of basically every single flaw in the case. I called up a piano mover, and had them pick it up from the church, sight unseen. I was so worried that I’d made a mistake, given that the moving was still about $400, but I got insanely lucky, with a beautiful looking and sounding piano worth about $5k for basically just the cost of moving it.

I’d put good money on a company doing something marketing/ad related. My first summer internship was at a company that did digital ads, and the amount of alcohol that was consumed on literally a daily basis was insane. I’m talking the majority of the office being having a minimum of 2-4 drinks after about 2pm rolled around, and probably triple that on Friday.

The only party I was there for was the CTO’s birthday, in which at lunch he received a piñata filled to bursting with those little alcohol shots, and by the end of the day basically everyone had to Uber home. For 19 year old me, it was pretty unreal seeing my bosses and coworkers that drunk in the middle of the week.

Knowing how fucked up everyone was during a normal workweek in the office, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if a Christmas party there was an absolute drug-filled rager.

Except it’s not, because potentially hundreds of thousands of people, who are most definitely not “the elite”, actually rely on them for, y’know, power? You’re not fucking over “the elite” by fucking with public infrastructure. They have backup generators and batteries and plenty of other ways to run their houses. Not only that, with something like a substation, they’ll probably cry to the government for help with an emergency outage and it’ll just be more public funds going to the.

Another adjacent life hack is when assembling flat pack furniture, use a quality wood glue on all the joints and connectors, but especially those little wood dowels. It won’t make it indestructible, but it’ll hold up far better over time.