Mr. Emaw's Neighborhood: Chapter 1 — The Elevator Incident

It struck me one day that over the years, I've had some pretty interesting neighbors. In fact, the people I've lived and worked next to have always been much more interesting than I am. So I thought I'd do a series of posts about some of them.

This story takes place about ten years ago. It was shortly after the first internet bust but before that quaint little (by today's standards) Enron financial implosion.

When the web startup I'd been working at closed up shop and headed to New Jersey, I took my first job at a cube farm corporation. It was a pretty good gig. The hours were flexible and me and a few other guys had a shared hard drive where we stored all the mp3s we downloaded from Napster.

I was lucky as the new guy to get a cube adjacent to a wall, so I only had one cube neighbor. We'll call her Janet. She was a great cube neighbor. Pleasant personality, always smiling, great sense of humor. She was a recent college grad and had snagged her job after doing an internship for the company.

She kept me up to date on all the pop culture news of the day.

She was one of the first on the block with one of those new-fangled "TiVo" devices and would give us daily updates on celebrity gossip and the latest exploits of the characters on Survivor and
The Geena Davis Show.

Janet was the social glue for our core group. There were about five of us who started having lunch together daily. As a group it was easier to rationalize, or maybe just ignore, the fact that you're leaving for lunch a few minutes early and getting back a few minutes late.

It was during one of these lunch jaunts that The Elevator Incident happened.

On these lunch outings, we typically would pool rides since it was ecologically the right thing to do and it provided a certain level of mutually assured destruction for getting back too late from The Olive Garden.

Anyway on this particular day, Janet and I had arrived back at the office from lunch. We strolled into the elevator, hit the "6" button and waited for the lift to deliver us to our floor.

As a joke, I always used to like to bounce the elevator a little bit by doing a few quick knee bends — kind of a fake jumping up and down when the other person's not looking to make them thing the elevator is falling or something. You know, for the laughs.

Well, to this day I maintain that that little stunt had nothing to do with our elevator doing an emergency stop between the first and second floors.

Nonetheless, stuck it was. Not moving, door closed and to make matters worse the emergency phone inside the elevator didn't work. It could have been my imagination, but I swear the lights were flickering and the vent fan had turned off.

Janet was ready to freak out. To calm her down, I told her that the building probably wasn't on fire and there almost certainly wasn't a Twilight Zone-style nuclear holocaust going on outside.

Still,I knew that if I couldn't find a way out of this, it wouldn't be long before we hit DEFCON LUDICROUS. But before I tried my daring escape through the ceiling access hatch, I pulled out my cutting-edge circa 1999 Nokia cellular mobile telephone.

With my phone's antenna extended, I dialed up the security desk to apprise them of our situation and get a maintenance dude to get us out of here.

Next I called my manager to let her know that Janet and I are stuck in the elevator, no, for real, we're in the elevator and the elevator stopped between floors. No, she's okay at the moment What? Well… of course we both have all of our cloths on…I mean, I slipped my shoes off but we all have our own coping mechanisms…

Before I was done with the call, an elevator technician had opened the doors. About waste level (for me) was the first floor ceiling/second floor floor. We were looking up (to the second floor) and a small crowd of or coworkers who had come to watch our daring escape. You can imagine the entertainment value we were providing.

The janitor elevator technician told us the plan was to help us crawl up to the second floor, then worry about getting the lift running again. Being the chivalrous sumbitch I am, I insisted that Janet go first. I would be able to help boost her up and, more importantly, if the elevator were suddenly to let loose it wouldn't be me getting sliced in half by a gigantic guillotine.

Well, to make a short story longer, we made it out of the elevator car safe and sound and had a good laugh for the next few hours and came away with a mildly amusing story to boot.

Eventually, I left that company for other professional pastures. It was eventually acquired in a corporate merger, and I kind of lost touch with Janet and the rest of the crew. It happens sometimes. Friends and neighbors go their separate ways.

Janet and I actually work at the same company now. She sits not too far from me on the same floor, but we don't have the same rapport that we had then.

And she still refuses to ride an elevator with me.

tagged: Enron, Napster, elevator, Geena Davis, Survivor, Nokia, neighbor

YouTube Tuesday: Conference calling

I'm fairly certain that anyone who works in a professional environment has dealt with this issue at some point.

If you're like me, working with agencies and colleagues on both coasts in a time when conference rooms have tended to become a virtual phenomenon rather than a tangible one, it's probably far more common that you prefer.

But at least we can still joke about it.



tagged: work, office, conference call, life, professional, David Grady

That's not my banana!

I'm crazy with conference calls all morning, so I'm focused on taking notes, looking at PowerPoint presentations and contributing as little as possible to the call.

Finally during a break between calls, I try to do a little tidying up around my cube. That's when I notice that there was a banana peel in my trashcan.


Only, I hadn't eaten a banana all morning! In fact, I was so busy with conference call meetings that I had only left my cube for a few minutest to get the requisite cup of coffee after starting up my pc.

My superior powers of deduction have led me to conclude that some socially defective cube drone was eating their breakfast while passing my cube and, instead of disposing of the refuse properly, they decided to dump it in my own private trash can.

So now I have to deal with the smell of rotting banana peel all afternoon? I don't think so, Sunshine. I don't know about you, but that's not the way we roll in my little plot of the cube farm.

I deftly exchanged my trash can with the offending peel for a trashcan from a cube a few aisles away. I think it was an unoccupied cube. But if you work in cube 1B963, well, er, sorry 'bout that.

tagged: corporate, office, trash, banana, cube

Memo RE: The coffee machine

TO: Coworkers on my floor
FROM: emawkc
RE: The Coffee Machine

Dear coworkers,
This memo is to remind you of how easy it is to start a new pot of coffee in the break room.

I understand that some of you have an inferior education, that remedial skills in following simple instruction weren't required to get a diploma from the University of Kansas.

But common decency and regard for the caffeine addictions of your coworkers demands that you learn the basic steps for starting a new pot of coffee after you take the last cup.

So let me explain:

• Step one - open a new pre-measured packet of coffee and pour it into the filter
• Step two - put the filter (with coffee therein) into the coffee machine between the place where the water comes out and the thing that the coffee goes into
• Step three - press the "start" button
• Step four - Put your tongue back in your mouth you drooling idiot!

Sorry if this memo is a little harsh, I'll be in better humor after I've had my coffee.

tagged: office, rant, coffee, humor