A Veritable Cornucopia of Useless Information

I’ve lived above Spaghetti Works for about a month and a half now. While I appreciate my apartment’s rock-bottom rent and convenient location to UNL, there are tradeoffs. Among them:

• I’ve never been to a place where a seemingly endless stream of vaguely creepy-looking folk just stand around aimlessly at all hours of the day until I moved here. Spaghetti Works’ actual operating hours have no effect on the number/variety of people I see hanging about. As best I can tell, none of the people standing in front of the building actually live here, and I have no clue as to the particular attractiveness of the 12th & Q corner to, say, the rest of downtown Lincoln.
• The fire escape has been broken since I moved here. The apartment manager told me when I moved in that it would be fixed “real soon”, which obviously hasn’t happened. To get around this blatant violation of building codes, the building’s management company has hired security guards to be here around the clock, checking for fires. For the first 2-3 weeks I lived here, the guards actually walked about the building every 15-20 minutes and were pleasant to talk to. Now, the only guards working here are obese middle-aged men and women who manage to blend into the somewhat creepy scenery and sit in their vehicles 99% of the time.
• There’s a guy who rummages through the dumpsters in the alley 2-3 times a week. You could set a watch to his arrival at 12:30 a.m. He digs out all the bottles and cans he can find, and loads them up into his (late-model, in good shape) SUV.
• Finally, the garbage trucks come to unload the dumpsters every other day at between 6 and 6:30 a.m., and construction work on the Lincoln Grand starts every day around 7.

Ugh. But it’s still cheap, now isn’t it?