September

About a million years ago (who me, exaggerate?) I owned a computer store. And I noticed that year after year the store’s busiest months would be September and January. You would think December would be busy for a retail store. But not for us, our primary clients were businesses and from what we saw businesses make decisions to spend gobs of money on computers in January and in September.

For the last (What year is it? Oh yeah.) 12 years I’ve been getting paid to make 1’s and 0’s look good in a web browser…and in that time I’ve noticed that my web design clients have the same “buying” pattern that my computer store clients had. My busiest months are always January and September.

It makes sense. People get done with the end of year holidays and think “I need to finally update that web site.” And they do the same at the end of their summer vacation. September is a time to get down to business.

But then when you live in Cancun September takes on another meaning. Here September jokingly gets called “Septihambre” which is a running together of the Spanish “Septiembre” (September) and the Spanish word for hunger which is “hambre.” The reason for Septihambre is that this is the slowest season here. The tourists do not come. The normally-full planes come with 10 or 20 or 30 passengers in them. The hotels are empty. The restaurants are empty. And so all those people here who live paycheck to paycheck and depend on tourism to keep them in the black end up suffering.

We get more crime in September here. People here are hesitant to travel in September because they figure their houses will be more likely to be broken into in September.

The other thing that happens in my house in September is that my husband’s job gets much more relaxed. Instead of needing to work 14 or more hours a day he is suddenly getting out early and is working many fewer hours. He is a bureaucrat so he gets paid the same whether he works a 24-hour shift (as occasionally happens) or a 6-hour shift. But what this really means is that he’s home a lot more in September, home bugging me (sometimes) and home distracting me (usually).

So while I’m running from one end of the day to the other, while I’m struggling to keep up with all the details of my business, while I’m rushing here and there, while I barely have time to eat or sleep or take a run, my husband is just hanging out.

Like right now…right now he’s here in the office hanging out in the hammock (along with the dog, who loves the hammock) blathering on to me about something or other. Good thing I’m not actually working right now.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 11:05 pm and is filed under Life in Cancun, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.