The running joke in Columbus, Ohio, is that the Orange Barrel is the State Symbol. This is because there is ALWAYS some road somewhere that is half-closed, under construction, rerouted, just a mess. When I moved to Washington I thought I escaped all that. HA! There is no escape from the Orange Barrel, it follows you like a Girl Scout with a cookie quota to meet.
They decided to widen the main thoroughfare I use every day to get to the freeway from our house. It was annoying, and inconvenient, but they're finally almost done with it and it did help improve the flow of traffic once it's all said and done. Just when I was settling in to enjoy it, the construction moved INTO MY WORK BUILDING. I think I'm being stalked by it.
My work rents part of a floor of a biiiig office building. The other floors have medical-ish offices. I think. Ok I admit I've walked past the little Directory of Offices in the lobby pretty much every day since I started working here a few years ago, but never actually glanced at it. I have been asked where such-and-such Doctor's office is by people wandering into the building as I make my way from the public bathrooms back to my office, so I assume there's doctors SOMEWHERE in the building. I usually tell them top floor. What? They probably needed the exercise anyway. (Oh, okay, there IS an elevator too) There are public bathrooms on the main floor, which is the floor my office is on, and also upstairs on the second floor. I tend to go to the upstairs bathroom, not due to any healthy thoughts of taking the stairs (which I do), but because the stall walls in that bathroom are a lovely scarlet color, instead of the boring tan ones downstairs. Plus, I'm pretty sure the bathroom is haunted. Anyway..
Since I make the foray upstairs pretty much every day to go potty, I couldn't help but notice when the spray-painted words appeared on what otherwise had been perfectly normal office walls. "DEMO ------->" scrawled along the entire wall. It was very mysterious, and I tried to figure out where the arrows where actually pointing because I was POSITIVE it was going to be a demo of some amazing new medical advancement, like a toilet seat that would say nice things about you when you sat down. ("Ooh, your butt is soo nice and warm!" "Oh my, you've lost weight, haven't you?!" "Why don't you sit for awhile, I've missed you!") Alas, it was actually just an abbrevation for "Demolition", which I found out a few days later when I came up the stairs and most of that wall was in fact gone.
Now, you may think this is a terrible thing, but actually, it was TOTALLY AWESOME. See, all the offices in our building have keycard doors. You can't (hypothetically speaking, of course) wander through the building when you work weekends and alllll the other businesses are closed and steal their post-it notes or see where they are hiding the new hi-tech toilet seats. Now, finally, you could see what was behind those magic doors! Um, it was cubicle offices, and then real offices against the wall that had windows. Major disappointment. The only neat thing was they had partially disassembled the cubicles, and just shoved all the STUFF from them into the middle of the room leaving an aisle so people could get to the real offices behind. I got rather voyeuristic enjoyment when going to the bathroom for the next week or so and seeing all those people EXPOSED working in their offices. HA! NO HIDING BEHIND WALLS FOR YOU!
Then one day, I came upstairs, and they had completely torn out the wall on the OTHER side of the landing. COOOOL! This used to be a sitting area, with pretty plants and modern art deco, and comfy looking chairs. At least, I *ASSUME* they were comfortable, since this area too was key-card entry denied. Big teases. Now, it was all gone, the lighting was gone, hell the drop ceiling was gone! They had hung a big plastic sheet across the gaping entrance, and in peeking around it, I could see down the entire length of the building. Electric boxes hanging from the ceiling. Totally gutted. WOW. I thought this was the coolest thing since sliced, slight toasted, buttered and jammed bread.
What I failed to take into consideration, is that this entire destroyed area was, in fact, directly above MY office. I soon was made aware of this fact, when upon sitting down to start work the next day, was startled repeatedly and randomly ALL DAY by BANG!BANG!BANG!BANG! ... DRIIIIILLLLLLLLL!!!... BOOOM!... CLANG!CLANG! ... BANG!BANG! And this happened at no set intervals, and not in the same location above us, and you could FEEL the banging through the floor it was so hard. It was so loud that when I would try to be responding to voice-activated phone trees, it would pick up on the noise and think I responded. This was annoying the first day. The second day, it was trying. We're now going on week 2. Our bosses have repeatedly talked to the building manager, who assures us they are doing as much of the work as possible at night/on weekends, but I aint buyin it. It's too loud, too consistently during the day. My only hope is that they are putting in an indoor skating rink, and I can break out the leg warmers and rollerskates and get my disco on. Hey, a girl can dream, right?
Talking toilet seats - Ha!
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