You want to know how to royally mess up your life? Let me tell you how:
1. Make the mistake of answering your voice mail when you get back from lunch on a Monday.
2. Screw up and return the call from the publisher of the sister newspaper that you work for.
3. When he says he wants you to go to Tucson, Ariz., to check out a job opportunity that he has at the sister newspaper, you go, even when you're perfectly content where you are.
4. You go, and end up accepting the job. You become editor of the Tucson Weekly.
So I this is what I recently ended up doing: Apartment hunting in Tucson while I, physically, was in Reno, even though I actually live in Las Vegas. Whaddya think of THEM apples?
Anyway, let me tell you that apartment hunting in a distant city is a real bitch. First, you have to either need to have someone mail you one of those apartment guides, or you have to go to the online version of those apartment guides and go nuts. In my case, I did both, because I am nothing if not redundantly anally retentive.
Then you have to decide what part of town to live in. For me, this was hard, because going into this process, I knew about as much about Tucson as I know about the art of yodeling in Yiddish.
"Well, duh," you say, "then pick somewhere near where your office will be." And to you, I say: Hell no, you know-it-all snot. It turns out that by all accounts, living near my office in Tucson would be a mistake for two reasons. First, the area generally sucks in terms of low amenities and high crime, and second, a loud Air Force base is nearby.
Therefore, I did what all savvy long-distance apartment-hunters do when they do not know what part of town they want to live in: I guessed.
After that, using the online apartment guides, you narrow down the list by searching for places with the features you want or need. My terms were price (cheap yet not the projects), pets (they have to allow small yellow lunatic cats named Beavis) and laundry facilities (I need a washer and dryer in my apartment because otherwise I will go nuts when I end up being two quarters short late one night, therefore unable to dry my unmentionables at the complex's pay laundry room).
Then, you take the qualifying apartments -- there were nine of them -- and find a friend who has lived in Tucson before to see what he thinks. In this case, I found my friend Kevin. Interestingly, Kevin lived in one of the qualifying apartment complexes while he was a student at the University of Arizona.
"The apartments themselves are nice," Kevin remarked about his former home. "The neighborhood's nice, too, especially if you like being robbed."
The conversation with Kevin narrowed the list to six.
Then, you get on a plane and spend three days running around to the various finalists in a crappy beige Dodge Neon rental car. This can be fun if you take it with a sense of humor and adventure. Alternately, you can treat the situation as a quest to find your HOME for the next months and years, as a result giving you heart attacks and seizures.
Finally, after weighing all the factors -- the price, the location, the number of cockroaches the size of terriers you see roaming the complex -- you pick a place.
Then you fill out approximately 234 pages of paperwork that appear to have been written by prank-loving lawyers on amphetamines.
The lessee agrees to maintain his/her/it apartment properly, or else the lessor will have the option to smack the lessee in his/her/sweet bippy with a four-iron pursuant to RMS Pinafore Sec. 27, Line 14, 49ers 6.
And then when all of this is finally finished, you fly home to Vegas, look around your apartment, and think that in six days, you will be living in this strange, new apartment in Tucson, sleeping on an air mattress, while all of your belongings will be in a moving truck whose whereabouts are unknown.
Now THAT is how to royally mess up your life.
Jimmy Boegle is a fifth-generation Nevadan who is hoping to God that he can manage not to misspell "Tucson" at his new job. Jimmy's column appears here Tuesdays, and he can be reached via e-mail at jiboegle@stanfordalumni.org.