Just a few moments after I posted yesterday I wandered out towards the front desk. A co-worker pointed out that it was raining and I expressed the usual delight and amazement that rain gets out here. Then she asked if I had heard about the downstairs conference room.
No... and... ???
Well, she said, it's raining there too.
Normally this wouldn't raise an eyebrow in this building, but the downstairs conference room has no windows and only one steel exterior door. This sounded intriguing so a couple of us trailed downstairs to admire it.
Sure enough, it was vigorously raining in a large section of the room. An optimist had put a small garbage can under some of the leakage but that only made the other seven or eight streams try all the harder. We contemplated this scene for a while. Then some other people wandered in and contemplated it as well. It was, we all agreed, rather weird. And rainy.
Finally someone In The Know from the top floor came to enlighten us all. The plumbers, it seems, had been foodling around somewhere on the roof or something and had managed to break a fresh water pipe [nb - since the rain collecting in the trash can was distinctly yellow this came as something of a relief]. They eyed the resulting flood for a bit and decided maybe shutting off the water supply would be a good thing. Then after a while longer they located a wet-vac and were busily sucking up the water on the roof. Of course by this time most of the flood had percolated down the interior walls of the whole building and was pattering down on the tatty carpet in our conference room.
We watched as a ceiling tile detached itself and fell with a sodden, and rather disgusting thump. This, we agreed, should be grounds for all just going home but none of us had the guts to actually do so.
Later that day I had an epiphany. It all makes sense now - the raised temperature in my office, the interior water feature downstairs: we're obviously being renovated as a tropical rain forest.
I feel all noble and carbon-friendly now. If a bit warm and damp.
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This is for Kirk von Ackermann, missing in Iraq since October 9, 2003.
2 comments:
Now you know why I finally gave up dickering with on-line helpful SS chirps and figured out how to outsmart the system by getting An Appointment with a Real NM person. Of course, mine was a simple case of signing up for SS, even though I say (or think) that I'm working as a freelancer, and the chirp or its actual counterpart does not recognize freelancing as Working....
Apparently the darn SS people didn't want me to talk to a real person - my letter only gave me the option of phoning in to them! I'm starting to wonder if Real People aren't being phased quietly out...
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