When the music stops, sit at the nearest desk

Being Frank, by Frank Ameduri

By the time you read this, there's a good chance I will have been crushed under a file cabinet or suffocated in a tangle of computer and phone wiring. That's because we've got a big office move planned for Saturday (yesterday for you, and tomorrow for me as I write this). Don't try to figure all that out, just trust me.

We're not moving to a different building -- Frontiersman will still be right here on the Palmer/Wasilla Highway when you stop in. The plan calls for the newsroom to switch places with the advertising department. On paper it looks simple enough. They're carrying some stuff upstairs, and we're hauling some stuff down. It's straightforward enough in theory, but there's always that human element.

The move requires a surprising amount of preparation. Things have to be put in boxes, phone lines and computer lines have to be run from the server room down to the editorial department's new digs, decisions have to be made concerning who will get which desk and a host of other pre-move-type wranglings.

Somehow I got roped into being the lead grunt on the cable-running crew. The job involved a lot of technical measurements and a fair amount of knocking holes in walls and climbing on rickety ladders and such. I could write three columns about the harrowing experience, but I'll let it suffice to say that, when I was finished, there was a lot of crumbled ceiling tile material on the floor, two seriously-injured employees, three heavily-damaged walls and bundles of cable sticking out of walls and ceilings in places that don't even make sense to me anymore. In fact, three cables cropped up in the building next door, and one is apparently sticking out of the floor under Mayor Diane Keller's foosball table. Since the cabling experience, which we now call "Black Wednesday," Tracy Ressler, our business manager, averts her eyes whenever I enter a room. I don't know if she does that to keep from laughing or crying.

Another pre-move task is boxing up all our stuff so it can be easily transported to our new habitat. This means performing something of an archeological dig through desk and file drawers, some of which were last opened when Scott Ogan was still wearing short pants and selling watered-down lemonade for a dollar a glass.

Some interesting things turn up when you're digging through drawers like that. Casey Ressler unearthed a plastic banana with a face on it, a desiccated Spam sandwich (the bread was desiccated, the Spam was still good), a talking John Elway doll and, for unknown reasons, a baby picture of Jeremiah Bartz.

Rindi White excavated a Frontiersman from 1980, a Vic Kohring Pez dispenser and a trick Matanuska Electric Association flashlight that, when you push the switch instead of lighting up says, "Don't blame us, blame Chugach."

Jeremiah Bartz found three old pairs of sneakers, a half-eaten chili dog (which he finished), a Casey Ressler baby picture and 31 of my missing pens.

My desk drawers were filled with relics from several previous editors. I uncovered 11 pounds of tear-stained tissues, three hand-written political manifestos (two were mine), 426 to-do lists (also tear-stained), an empty bottle of scotch and bumper stickers with messages like, "Free Tibet," "Save Blind Manatees," "Clinton Never Touched That Girl … or That One Either," "Regime Change Begins at Home," and so on.

Instead of throwing away most of those strange things, we simply got together in the middle of the newsroom and had a sort of journalists' swap meet. I ended up with the Kohring Pez dispenser, the Bartz and Ressler baby pictures, a few of my old pens and the plastic banana. Rindi walked off with a pair of sneakers, eight of my old pens and one of the manifestos.

Cub reporter Daniel Spoth was hellbent on having the blind manatee bumper sticker and traded away a valuable Bob Dole bobblehead doll, a collection of photos of Randy Ruedrich whispering in various people's ears and a woodcut of Ted Stevens as a baby. For all of that, Spoth got the manatee bumper sticker, four of my pens, a David Neid rookie card and the Spam sandwich, though there's still a dispute about the sandwich.

In the end, all of our stuff will end up downstairs, in different drawers along with all kinds of new stuff. Somehow Bartz will end up with all my pens again, and the Frontiersman will continue to publish on schedule. After all, we're professionals.

Frank Ameduri has a like-new Carter/Mondale bumper sticker he's willing to trade for a photo of Scott Ogan in short pants.