Like Manna From Heaven

For a brief period of about 10 months to a year it seemed that the media in New York was fixated on the fact that there were old buildings in the city that were falling apart - literally - before one's very own eyes. The devolution of these decrepit buildings was evidenced by the fact that actual bricks and other building materials had slowly begun to crumble and fall off of building facades city-wide.

These heavy bricks and bits of plaster had actually fallen and seriously injured some innocent passers-by and the City Buildings Commission was put on high alert throughout the city.

Amidst this hysteria and infatuation with every pebble or luggee that came hurtling from building tops towards the sidewalk at extreme velocity, I strolled into work one morning on 23rd street. On this particular morning, in front of the entrance to my building, I was surprised to see firemen and other officials milling about near the entrance which had been roped off with pink tape. I paused in front of the building and noticed that a few large bricks - the same color as the bricks on my building - were lying on the sidewalk with large pink circles drawn around them where they lay. If was almost as if the bricks themselves had suddenly died and their corpses had been encircled in pink chalk outlines.

I made eye contact with one of the firemen and he asked me, "Do you work inside?"
"Yes"
"You can go right up."
I moved past him into our building's sparse lobby and took the elevator up to the 3rd Floor where the uncertainty of what would happen next had taken hold of most everyone.
"What are you doing here?", our spandex wearing yet curiously overweight Operations Manager squawked. "They're probably going to close the building."
At that moment a man in a blue City of New York windbreaker with graying hair and glasses moved past me to speak to our CEO.

Thinking that this decision process could take the better part of the morning I left the scene and headed back to my desk. If there were any evacuations to be made I'm sure I'd hear about it.

Much to my surprise, less than an hour later our CEO, a short, high-strung older Jewish man in his early 60's came by my desk and said curtly "Come on. Let's go. They're closing the office."

Bob Karcy, our CEO was obviously not in agreement with this decision but was powerless to fight it. Powerlessnes was a state with which Bob was largely unfamiliar. Fortunately, there was a work-related convention going on in mid-town that we were planning on attending anyway so we left the office and headed uptown a little earlier than originally planned.

Later that afternoon, during a lull in the conference, Bob headed back to the office to see if it had been reopened. With most of the day already gone - I headed home.

Apparently when Bob returned to the building it had been reopened and he worked what was left of the day. During our next pay period I would later discover that my failure (and everyone else's for that matter) to return to the office for this tiny slice of the workday would cost myself and my co-workers a half day's worth of vacation. I remember seeing this on my check and being dumbfounded. "The city closed the office", I would say. With no one upon whom he could take out his frustrations, Bob turned his ire from the City to his own employees who didn't go that extra mile to finish the workday.

Thinking back on this, however, I reflect more profoundly upon the poor state of the building itself and not the pettiness of my boss. When I first interviewed with Bob one of the things I most vividly remembered was how I felt when I approached the building itself from the outside and how crestfallen I was upon seeing this faded, nearly dilapidated looking office building in a gritty, plain block of the Gramercy Park/Flatiron District. I literally groaned and looked away in disgust not knowing that this sad excuse for an office would be my professioinal home for 4 years.