Category: Internships

The office directly behind my cube at work is currently empty, so I sometimes wander in there to check out the view. It’s not all that nice, but it does have trees in it.

This morning, I checked it out after a phone call from Maria and confirmed her statement: it was snowing pretty hard, again. The direction of snow falling when you’re on the twelfth floor, apparently, is completely horizontal.

Some hours later, I came back from lunch and checked out the big window-wall at the end of the hallway, which (unlike the office window) looks out the narrow end of the building. The sun was brilliant and warm, and the streets were entirely clear, black with runoff.

Just now, I went back into the office and found that the surrounding area was blizzard-white.

So basically, either the hallway window here sees the future, or the office window sees the past. Amazing!

I got a bunch of Casual Day stickers in exchange for donating to the office Angel Tree, in a typical let’s-defeat-the-point kind of gesture. Casual Day stickers, as you might guess, allow you to wear casual clothes for one day per sticker. The thing is this: I don’t own any jeans, and all of my formerly respectable cargoes and khakis have now degraded to the point where only an emo kid or grad student would be caught wearing them. In order to maintain even a modicum of professionality in the office, I’ll still have to pick clothes out of my Nice Work Clothes wardrobe.

So next week, on Monday and Friday, I am–get ready–going to come to work with my shirt untucked.

(Gentlemen, you may revive your ladies with a gentle fanning.)

In other work news, it occurred to me on the elevator that I do a lot of thinking on elevators, because elevator trips in this building are freaking interminable. It occurred to me shortly afterward that this can only get worse the higher up you go, which makes it ridiculous that higher floors are reserved for people with increasing amounts of importance.

You could argue that they enjoy a nicer view from that height, but the fact is the view sucks. It’s all parking lot, clogged highway and leprous rusted roofs. I think it has to be the last gasp of the Puritan work ethic: the CEO and other assorted Grand Mugwumps up on 16 are trying to punish themselves for being successful.

When I buy the old YWCA building and turn it into a thriving commercial hub with a bakery and apartments and all that, man, my offices are going to be right down on the bottom.

Either that, or I’ll have a really monster fire-station pole, with a catapult for getting back up.

I went upstairs to the thirteenth floor (dun dun DUUNNN) (actually it’s called 14A, so maybe not) to return a borrowed book. Up there they’ve clearly had some personnel cuts, and most of the minicubes are defragged, which leaves a fifteen-foot-wide corridor between two banks of them. There’s exactly one occupied desk on those two banks. My thoughts on noticing this:

• Cool!
• But lonely.

I know it’s Halloween, but it’s still a little surreal to walk into the break room for a cup of water, see a guy washing his hands, and do a double take when I realize his hands are full of HUMAN EYEBALLS!