As the elevator doors slide closed behind me, I round the corner to observe that the office is quiet — perfectly, blissfully quiet — just as it always is.
I love Monday mornings.
The 19th floor of the Hamilton Building is a delightful place, a veritable paradise on earth. The ceiling of the main lobby, or “atrium†as we like to call it, is 25 feet high, except for the dramatic glass cathedral skylight in the center — that reaches some 12 feet higher. In fact, the 19th floor was originally the 19th – 22nd floors. We had to do a substantial amount of structural work to accommodate all the marble we brought in, especially for the fountain. As we made our way up the building over the years (starting with just a single office way down on the second floor), we left our mark at every stage of the ascent. So today we not only have an executive suite that Kublai Khan himself would be proud to call his own, we have very comfortable accommodations all the way down to the first floor. The sniveling, underachieving whiners with whom I swore I would always identify — that lasted about six months — have it better than they can possibly imagine. Whenever any of them has the temerity to complain about anything, I fantasize taking them back to the sixth floor of the old WorldConneX building and letting them cool their heels in one of those cubicles for a few hours.
Of course, that would never work. Even if the setting could be recreated (and it couldn’t; Vision bought out WorldConneX years ago, a move that I had a small hand in — although, come to think of it, that doesn’t necessarily imply an improvement in habitat for the local fauna), the essential angst would be gone. The ingrate in question would know that he or she would be coming back to work for me before long, so the experience would be devoid of that heaviness, that slow, persistent dread, that thought that one must always try to suppress, though one can never fully escape — I’m going to be stuck in this hell-hole for the rest of my life.
Aside from the lobby, the 19th floor houses only the boardroom and two offices, my own and that of my Chief Operating Officer. The Chief Counsel, CFO, and lesser luminaries dwell in somewhat more, shall we say, reserved opulence on the 16th-18th floors. They are a fine bunch, friendly and deferential to me and scared to death of the COO. Just as it should be.
Good Cop is the role I was born to play.
