We are all being moved to a new headquarters. It’s...

Friday, March 12, 2010

We are all being moved to a new headquarters. It’s so new that it’s still incomplete, but plenty of people have been over there for months already, sitting in their chairs while high above their heads construction workers put finishing touches on the upper levels.

The relocation process chases the construction like a dogged little brother, with folks being sent over to populate the building sequentially from the bottom to the top. My group, assigned to one of the highest floors, will be last to arrive. Everyone is allowed to pack three small boxes, someone found out at a meeting last week. “If it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t ship,” she announced, aglow with information. I wondered if she’d cribbed that line or made it up herself. “Oh yeah, and there’s gonna be six bathroom stalls.”

There aren’t many people left in our current building, which is a bummer for all the soup shops and shoe shines in the basement lobby. Some have disappeared, fed up with this purgatory or maybe just broke. Heartening rumors occasionally swirl: Diego, who once built me a brand new high heel after I’d snapped the original, Mentos commercial-style, was spotted over at the new building just the other day. Or so someone heard.

There’s no obvious way to divine that I work in a ghost building just by looking at it, or even by being inside. It’s not like it looks any smaller, or feels any lighter. But its inner desolation is betrayed by the elevators, all of them as snap-to-it and eager as the summer interns that once filled them. Press the down button and there one is, happy to help. Oh, you meant to press up? It’s no problem at all.

Their ubiquity seems humiliating, and I wonder if they are ever ashamed. “Oh, I was just in the neighborhood,” they must long to explain, averting their eyes with practiced nonchalance. “I was in between meetings and killing some time.”