Unemployment

Even though, as I noted in yesterday's entry, I am no longer employed, today I nevertheless woke up early. I had a trip to make, to the unemployment office, to apply for the benefits that it entails. I will be getting paid a rather acceptable amount of money, which makes me happy. I will be needing that money for my studies. Despite how much I want to, I won't be spending any of that money on comics, video games, etc. Survival first, luxuries later.

In the back of my mind, I was half expecting it to be empty. I went on the first working day of the year, and I luckily didn't have to wait long. But there was still a sizable number of people, which is what I should have expected.

Spain is going through a tremendous economical crisis, much like the rest of the world, but one that is accentuated by the tremendous unemployment rates. As it stands right now, it's a hair underneath 20 percent. It's double than the rest of Europe. That's one in five people currently out of job.

Any way you slice it, they are bad numbers. And it just went up, at least, by one more.

A Day in The Life

To understand why I haven't been writing as much as I would like to, it is important to understand what a typical day was like for me. For those of you that don't know, I currently live in Spain, and most people's work schedule in this country is broken up in two parts. You go to work in the morning, come back home for lunch, and then head back to work for the other half of the day. This has a nasty side effect of taking up your whole day, and reducing any free time to a minimum. This is what my typical work day would look like:

7:30 AM - Wake up. Breakfast, daily grooming, and getting ready for work. 

8:30 AM - Bus commute to work. Roughly half an hour, which I would use to read books and/or comics (though not floppies, as carrying them in my backpack would easily damage them), listen to podcasts, or just check Tweets. 

9:00 AM - Work. 

1:30 PM - Get out of work for lunch. Again, a commute back home of half an hour. 

2:00 PM - Lunch. I'm pretty lucky that my wife usually cooks for me so the food would ready when I got home (She does this because she is home in the morning, not because she is the wife. Last year, when she had to go her school in the morning, I usually started cooking as soon as I got home)

Here I would have around 30 or 40 minutes of free time, give or take. I would use this time to check for important emails or messages, answer them, and check news. And cuddle with my wife. There must always be cuddle time. When I was feeling particularly tired, I also took a power nap (about 20 minutes) which would help me get through the rest of the day.

3:30 PM - Commute back to work. 

4:00 PM - Work

7:30 PM - Get out of work for the day. Commute back to home.

8:00 PM - This is the time that I would get home for the day, where you can finally relax and enjoy the rest of your day... which is only 4 or so hours. And this time includes dinner, taking baths, walking the dog, etc. Any writing or comic reading that I would want to get done must either be done in this time period or not be done until the weekend. 

12:00 PM - Ideally, this would be the time I'd try to get to sleep that would guarantee me the minimum amount of rest to survive the next day. I often failed spectacularly.

As you can see, the work schedule is absolutely brutal. You leave the house at 7:30 AM and only really finish your work day twelve hours later. Even though it's only eight hours of work a day, the same as (mostly) everyone else, it manages to feel like the whole day. I wasted two hours in commute every day, and while I manage to find ways to utilize them, if my work schedule had been continuous it would have been half of that.

And that's a regular day! If I needed to get something done, like say go to the bank, post office, or comic book store, I would need to take out and extra half an hour from the free time. You see, nothing here is ever open on Sundays, and banks, for example, open only from 8 AM to 2 PM. To say that it's a pain in the ass is an understatement. Back in the United States, I would work from 7 AM to 3 PM, which meant that I had the whole afternoon for myself. Even the typical 9 to 5 job would grant you more freedom. There have been talks of adopting those kind of continuous work hours, but knowing Spain, it probably won't be for years until they finally establish it. As it stands, most of the country works in what is called here "Horario Partido" (divided hours).

Of course, that is all over for me. December 31st, 2010 was my last day at work, and I am currently unemployed. That routine is forever gone (or at least until my next job). 

Tomorrow: A trip to the unemployment office!

Printing Press

I am staying home today from work because I am still somewhat sick. What does that mean? BLOGGING SHALL ENSUE!

As some of you know, and some of you are about to learn, I work in a office supplies and legal bookstore ...um... store. It is a family owned company that has been pretty much in the same family for over a century! The building where I work has also been around for over a century, and the company also owns a printing press that has been around for about the same amount of time.

The printing press is now moving to a smaller, and cheaper place, because nowadays most of the printing is done digitally, and the older (and bigger) machines had become obsolete and useless. I was lucky enough to visit the printing press on the last day of the move. My verdict? The place is indeed old. I took some pictures that I wanted to show, make sure to click on them if you want the full view.

Here's an outside shot of the printing press from the building right in front of it. I am not very knowledgeable about architecture, so I don't know what particular name those structures on top of the building have, but it does look a lot like something you would see in a medieval castle.

Here's another photo, but this time from higher up, where you can see those structures a bit better, and the size of the building in of itself. Again, this was taken from the building across from the printing press. How did I gain access to it? We'll get to that in a second.

Here's an photo of the inside of the printing press. The bottom floor is now almost empty, but that's where all the machinery used to be. The second floor hadn't been used for some time, but in yesteryear, it was used to store the paper that was already printed, as well as covers, paper blocks, and all other kinds of material.

And here's another angle of that same floor. This part is almost completely empty, with only trash left there. In the back, you can see some of the offices that the place had. You can infer the size of the whole place by comparing it to the man (Jose/Pepe, a coworker) who looks tiny in this photo.

Here's a close-up of those huge pieces of furniture that were in earlier photos. These were used to store the metal letters that were used for the printing press. Each drawer would have different sizes and different fonts of letters, numbers, and symbols.

The workers would sit in front of these tables and compose a page, and you can see an assembled on there on the left of the photo. On the right, there's lots of tiny little blocks of metal. Do you know what those are? They are the spaces that they would have to leave between words and to indent paragraphs. Because of the way that the printing press works, you needed to assemble a complete line, even if there was only a single word in it.

Here's some more of the typographic letters that they would use to assemble a page. We are actually selling most of the by bigger fonts at the store where I work, as a memento. People can assemble their own names, company names, or numbers. They can also work as rudimentary stamps (although regular ink won't stick to it as much as it would do to rubber)

Here's something else that's very interesting. Our company works a lot with city halls and other government institutions. These are the logos and symbols that you would see on their official paper and envelopes, that the workers at the printing press had to hand craft in order to be able to print. I have no idea how long it would take to make one of these, as they have an intricate amount of detail carved on to them, and they are made out of metal.

I don't remember exactly what all these machines did, but I know for certain that the one on the left was used to melt metal. I think the other one was to make them into metal bricks, but I am not sure. Basically, when the metal typographic letters got old or damaged, they would melt them and make new ones. This is also the place where they would craft the custom symbols as seen in the previous picture.

Most of the usable machinery was either sold or moved to the new place by the time I visited, but this antique still remained. I wish I had taken a better photo of it though, but basically the paper would be fed manually on one side to be printed and it would come out from the other one. My guide (the aforementioned Jose/Pepe) told me that he once saw a coworker get his hand stuck there. Yes, I shivered.

This is another relic that was used to cut the paper in different formats. Most paper is delivered in huge sheets that must be later be trimmed down to the common sizes. This machine still works, but they use more modern machinery now. There seemed to be no grisly stories about this one, thankfully.

Now, remember earlier I said that I was able to get into the building directly in front of the printing press? Well this is the building. It is also owned by the same people. You see, back when this place was built, people didn't really travel to work, they lived and worked in the same place. So directly in front of the warehouse that houses the printing press, there are a group of houses where the workers used to live. I was able to explore parts of that building too, although not all of it, because there's still sections which are still being used. I took photos in the abandoned sections of the building. Oh yeah, and it has an honest-to-god clock tower. That's pretty damn cool.

This room is the stable. That should give you another notion of how old this building is, as houses back then were built with stables for the livestock they had. They kept a couple of horses in here, that they used to pull the cart that they would use to deliver the material from the printing press.

This is a close-up of the the clock tower, taken from the roof of the building. It would be pretty cool to go in there, right? Well, guess who has two thumbs and went in there? THIS GUY.

Ever wonder what the behind of a huge clock looks like? Well, here's your answer. The surface of the clock is made up of marble, so it must weight a lot, but the machinery doesn't work anymore.

And here's me at the top of the clock tower. You can see the roof of the printing press in the back. There was a really nice view from up there.

So that is it for today! Hopefully you guys enjoyed this educative ride. One of these days I will take my camera to work and I will take pictures of the place where I work day-to-day.