On the morning of April 1st, my first day at my new job, I was given a list of expectations and responsibilities. One of the first things on the list was finding a new office space for our rapidly expanding organization. In the three months that I have been working, we have doubled the size of our staff. Granted that means that we now have four full time employees instead of two, but it also means that half of our employees (myself included) had been working in the reception area of our Massachusetts Avenue office.
So, as if I hadn’t done enough apartment hunting and moving in my personal life, I was spearheading an effort in my professional life as well. Commercial real estate is a gross gross game. I don’t know much about it, but I do know that most of the people that you’ll deal with are not people that you would want for friends or that you would want to see your sister date. So after making a string of phone calls, based on signs posted on buildings, internet research and a couple of blatant stabs in the dark, I had set up a couple of meetings with various agents and building managers to see what their buildings had to offer. Some of them were less offensive than others.
The first place that we looked at, which was right across the street from our current office, was quite excellent. But, if there is one thing that I have learned about the adult world is that if you like something, you need to act as horribly blasé about it as humanly possible. Baudelaire would be appalled, but Flaubert would certainly applaud. And while I was well versed in this concept, one of our student interns was not. And as we explored the space he loudly and continuously commented on how “fantastic” it was. To further add to the pain of the experience, the agent who was showing us the space might actually have set a new standard for sleazy, obnoxious Jewish men. I didn’t like him at first when after hearing my name he asked if I was from Long Island (which implies some incredibly derogatory notion of Jappiness in my mind, though he might have meant it as a compliment) and my disdain for him grew even more when weeks later he asked me, over the phone, if I liked him more than when I originally had met him. My reply: “Is it your job to be liked? My opinion really shouldn’t matter.”
We looked at other places as well. One was located next to the railroad tracks and so far away from Union Station that as we walked there in broad daylight, David proclaimed that he couldn’t in good conscious get a space in that location for fear of me being raped and murdered on the walk to the train. The space was even worse than the location, if you can believe that. We checked out a couple of other nice spaces in the safer part of the neighborhood, but the first one still remained the real gem.
It took a lot of negotiating and wrangling but nearly 2 1/2 months after I had begun the search for a new office space, we signed a five year lease to move into the space that the intern had repeatedly deemed “fantastic!”
But, that is all prelude to moving day. On the night before the 4th of July, we decided to relocate across the street with the help of a moving company which tried to convince us to postpone our early evening move because of the heat. They, in fact, ended up postponing it by themselves as they arrived nearly three and a half hours after they were scheduled to show up.
Already peeved when they pulled up at 9 p.m., we then went on to face virtually every other obstacle (extreme heat and humidity, narrow glass doors, inflexible security guards and an asshole of a building engineer) that a bad Hollywood pitchman could think up for some not so funny comedy. There was even a father and teenage son combo to add to the uncomical pain.
At 1 a.m. the movers left the office. All of our stuff was in our new office space. I set up my computer and I was hit by a wave of energy as I say at my desk in my office. A little bit of my own space, where I could listen to grating punk rock without disturbing anyone, where interns would not constantly be asking me questions, where I could write extended emails without feeling as though someone was looking over my shoulder, where I could call the gynecologist and not feel like everyone else in the entire office was listening to my medical and sexual history.
And then about 30 seconds later, I was so incredibly tired that all I wanted to do was to get the hell out of there and start my long weekend. I dropped Rhett off in Dupont and drove David all the way up to his house in Van Ness. When I finally parked my car on Monroe Street, it was nearly 2 a.m., almost 18 hours had passed since I had left the house that morning. Eighteen very long hours…
No comments:
Post a Comment