Let me hear you say - UP, TOWN!!!!!

There's been a wrinkle in Paradise this past week: my commute. I've been soldiering through it with a relentless cheerfulness, mostly because there was no way around it and I wasn't going to let anything get in the way of me enjoying my new apartment.

I live on West 83rd Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam. I work in an office in Jericho, Long Island. So it's a reverse commute, but that means less in New York than it does anyplace else. I have two options for getting to work:

OPTION 1: Take the train like every other New Yorker, just go a whole lot further. Walk four blocks down Broadway to 79th St. (about four minutes)and catch a 1 or 9 train to Penn station (twenty minutes), then catch a Long Island Railroad train out to Hicksville (50 minutes and I'm not joking the name of the stop really is Hicksville, you can look it up), then catch the 48 or 49 bus to the Jericho Quadrangle building where I work (about eight minutes). Add in time waiting for each train or bus and the commute comes to about one hour and forty minutes or two hours depending which train you catch out of Penn, because the train and bus schedules don't match up well. Total costs for the trip are somewhere around $20 a day round trip. I did this once last week, it pretty much sucks

Option 2: Drive. When I tell people that live here that I drive to my job they go white. Driving is a whole different animal in NY. If you don't live here, you really have no idea how unfriendly a place it is for drivers. There's a good reason for that though, I mean with 8 million or so people in the city, it's just not possible for everyone to own a car. There are several problems assocciated with driving in the city.

The first problem is parking. The best option, if you've got the money, is to rent a spot at a garage. If you shop it around you'll be lucky to rent a spot for $500 a month (You might also have the option to buy a co-op type spot for about $90,000-$110,000). Suffice it to say I don't have that kind of loot. So I have to park on the streets. Except for the weekend when it's rarely possible to keep a car in the same spot for two days in a row so on the weekends the Rice Rocket lives with my parents.

If I'm lucky and I get out of work at 5:00, I can usually find a spot within four blocks, but about half the time, the spot will be under a "No Parking 7AM-10AM" sign so that means I've really got to get my ass out to the car early in the morning. There's no grace period here, I can't afford to absorb the occasional ticket, because a simple parking ticket never runs you less than $90 here.

The second problem is the drive itself. Down to 65th Street, through the park, down to 59th Street, over the Queensboro Bridge into Queens, Van Damn Street over to the LIE, and straight through to Jericho. It can run anywhere from an hour and ten minutes to two hours depending upon time of day, weather, and local traffic patterns.

The third problems is that delays get compounded on this drive. If I'm coming home and get delayed for a half hour by an accident on the LIE it's certain to cost me another 20 minutes getting onto the ramp of the Queensboro Bridge and maybe another 10 minutes getting crosstown. All of which just decreases my chances of getting a good parking spot. Most spots are metered parking from 9AM-7PM. After 7PM they disappear. See problem 1.

I've sucked all this up with good humor and used it as an opportunity to listen to more of Howard Stern in the morning, and actually listen to whole albums in the evening. My car stereo, while not totally pimped out, is pretty damn good and that helps.

My company does have a New York City office and while my duties at work typically keep me in Jericho, there are definitely enough things that I could do remotely to justify working in swing space at the 11 Penn Plaza office (twenty minutes by subway from my apartment, walkable in nice weather if I'm up for some exercise). The problem is my boss, hates the idea.

I know this. I ask anyway. She takes a deep breath, "Normally I'd say absolutely not, but you should really ask Todd when he's here tomorrow." Todd is a VP in my department and he had scheduled fifteen minute meetings with everyone in our department on Friday.

I sit down across from him at 3:15. He looks across the desk at me and says, "How do you like the idea of working in the city? Our whole department is moving to the 11 Penn Plaza office." I almost kissed the man.

The change will save me 15 hours a week in commuting time and a couple thousand dollars a year. Check back later or maybe tomorrow for the full story on my "Chrispy goes crazy on the Upper West Side" celebration that night.