Monthly Archives: March 2015

Lease Renewal.

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If you have a lease with me that expires on May 31, now is the time to renew it. My leases do not automatically renew when they expire. If you intend to move out when your lease expires, you have to give me 60 days written notice. It’s in your lease. If you want to stay when your lease expires, you need to contact me immediately so I can prepare a lease extension.

Mark’s Job Hunting Tip #1

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When making appointments, use specific dates.

‘Today’ and ‘tomorrow’ can be dangerous words in e-mails. A lot of people have missed job interviews because they used the words ‘today’ or ‘tomorrow’ ambiguously. Don’t say: “I’ll see you tomorrow at 3 o’clock.” Say: “I’ll see you tomorrow, Tuesday, June 3 at 3 o’clock.” Keep in mind that ISPs (Internet Service Providers) go down all the time. When they do, e-mails get delayed, sometimes for hours. If you send someone an e-mail at 3:00PM that says ‘I’ll see you tomorrow’, the recipient may not get your message until he comes to work the following day, in which case, you may show up a day early or a day late for your appointment. Don’t leave prospective employers (or anyone else) wondering what date you are talking about. It makes you look unprofessional. It also makes you look like someone who doesn’t pay attention to details, and worst of all, you could miss your appointment. Remember the old saying – You only get one chance to make a good first impression.

There is another problem with the words ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow.’ There are different ways of thinking about the meaning these words. For some people, ‘today’ means ‘this day’, or in other words, from sunrise to sunset. For other people, ‘today’ means sunrise to sunrise, and for other people it means midnight to midnight. A lot of people use the words ‘day’ and ‘date’ as though they thought that these words meant the same thing, but they don’t. In your mind, your day may have started when you got out of bed this morning, but you know that the date changed at midnight. ‘Today’ and ‘tomorrow’ can be ambiguous. Dates are specific. Use specific dates in all your business correspondence.

I often have this problem in my business. When I have a house for rent listed on Craigslist, I frequently get e-mails from people with questions like: “Can I see your house sometime tomorrow?” I don’t answer questions like that with ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ because I don’t know what this person has in mind by ‘sometime tomorrow’. I write back and ask: “Specifically when would you like to see the house?” You might be surprised at how frequently people are offended and get angry with me when I ask them to tell me exactly when they want to come on over and see my house. It’s strange, but this happens quite often.

Worst Applicant Ever

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The  Loose Screw. While I’m on the subject of e-mails from prospective tenants,  let me mention the ‘loose screw.’ A ‘loose screw’ is an expression that my father used to use. A person with a loose screw is ​somebody who is just plain screwy. He is what is known in the San Francisco bay area as a ‘Berkeley type’, and there are a lot of Berkeley types in Berkeley. Berkeley types are usually well educated, articulate, and interested in the arts and politics. These people are not mentally ill, and they are certainly not stupid. They are just really weird. I always have my antennae up when reading e-mails from prospective applicants, looking for the guy with a loose screw. Here are some e-mails that I received the last time I had an apartment listed for rent on Craigslist. Do any of these people sound to you like they have a loose screw?

“Your apartment is exactly what I am looking for. I am very excited! I am ready to sign a lease now and move in tomorrow. I just have one question. Where is Berkeley?”

“I saw your ad on Craigslist. Your ad says that the apartment has 4 bedrooms. Are they all inside?”

“Your ad says that you won’t allow a dog. What about 2 dogs?”  (This one is my favorite!)

Civil War Inventions.

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Every year around this time, I teach Civil War history at Orinda Intermediate School, and I’ve been doing this for a long time. A lot of modern weapons were invented or first used in the Civil War, including repeating rifles, land mines, iron battleships, submarines, and machine guns. However, a lot of other inventions came out of the Civil War besides weapons. Some of them might surprise you.
CivilWarCanOpener1. Can openers. Union soldiers ate a lot of canned food during the Civil War. Although canned food had been around for 50 years prior to the Civil War, strangely, nobody made can openers prior to the war. Prior to the Civil War, people opened tin cans with hammers and chisels or hatchets. Opening tin cans made a huge mess and frequently injured the person trying to open the can. After many soldiers were injured opening tin cans, the Union army started ordering and distributing can openers to soldiers in 1862.
2. Home delivery of mail. Prior to the Civil War, people picked up their mail at the post office. During the war, the number of letters being mailed increased dramatically, as soldiers wrote home to their families and families wrote to soldiers. In 1863, the post office started delivering mail to people’s homes, but only in cities where the cost of the postage was less than the cost of delivering the letter. In other words, the post office began home delivery of mail where and when it was profitable.
3. Left and right shoes shaped differently. Prior to the Civil War, right and left shoes were interchangeable. During the Civil War, experiments conducted by the U.S. War Department showed that soldiers could march much farther without exhaustion when wearing boots cut differently for the right and left foot. Union soldiers were given boots shaped for the right and left foot, but Confederate soldiers continue to wear the old style interchangeable boots. That proved to be a big disadvantage on long marches, like from Virginia to Gettysburg.
4. National paper currency. The U.S. government did not start printing paper money until the Civil War. The U.S. government made coins, but not paper money. Most paper money was made by state chartered banks. The U.S. government quickly ran out of gold and silver coins early in the war and began printing paper money in 1861. Counterfeiters were not far behind. By the end of the war, the U.S. government estimated that about 1/3 of all the paper currency in circulation was counterfeit.
5. Standard premade clothing in sizes small, medium, and large. Prior to the war, stores carried clothing in one size only. If something didn’t fit, you had to take it to a seamstress to make it bigger or smaller. The army found that it was cheaper and more efficient to buy clothing in different sizes.
6. Absentee ballots. Northern politicians knew that Union soldiers were likely to vote Republican, so Republican-controlled state legislatures passed laws allowing soldiers to vote by mail.
7. Income tax. The U.S. government needed money to finance the war. Prior to the Civil War, the federal government had very little income, most of which came from liquor taxes and import duties.
8. Military aircraft. The Union army used hot air balloons for reconnaissance. They would send a soldier up in a balloon with a telescope. He would look down at what was going on behind Confederate lines and write down on a piece of paper what he saw. Then he would tie the paper to a small rock and drop the rock out of his basket. A soldier on the ground would remove the paper from the rock and take it to headquarters. This was observed by a young German military officer named Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. He was sent to the U.S. by the Bavarian government during the Civil War to observe and report on new weapons. Zeppelin was fascinated by the hot air balloons being used by the U.S. army. He returned to Germany, where he invented the zeppeli