The Dogs of Bore

Part One: The Rubble, The Witch, and The Carpenter

A couple of months after I started working at BigAnonymous I went to see Michael Clayton. Remember, in which George Clooney plays a fixer for a law firm whose client makes a pesticide that poisons people? (I’m not sure why this shocks anyone, as pesticide is poison by definition. My favorite recent iteration of the “No – that’s bad for you?” trope is when someone came out with a study a few months ago that Botox has potentially adverse effects on the brain. This just in: injecting BOTULISM into your FACE could be detrimental to your health! Next up in The Genius’s Handbook: “Razor Blades—Good for Juggling?”)

Besides having the best creepy murder ever (lethal injection under the toenail) and amazing super-androgyne Tilda Swinton at her icy-façade-cracking best, for me one of the movie’s biggest gooses was that the BigAnonymous Building stood in as the law firm’s headquarters, ext- and interior. (I may have yelped slightly when I saw George Clooney walk through the same electronic barrier I walk through every morning.) On the American version of The Office, whenever someone goes to "Corporate," my building is where they go. Apparently—and I haven’t confirmed this, but I found this fun little site while trying—it figures prominently in SPIDER-MAN 2. It’s the width of a city block. The outside is vertical gray metal beams alternating with dark tinted glass, the interior is clad in tan marble accented with narrow slabs of slightly darker marble arranged in geometric patterns, it’s 50 stories high, and Hollywood has decided that, of all the locations they have to choose from, the building I work in every day is the perfect embodiment of nameless, faceless, possibly evil Corporate America. Swell!

In the front lobby is a four-foot high black granite wall from behind which five security guards direct visitors to various tenant firms. Despite two giant planters filled with identical sets of flora (smallish tree surrounded by grassy plants and assorted flowers) on either side, the ambience is best described as “5-star hotel lobby renovated by a prison warden.” The weird thing is, they’re obsessed with having art on the walls. (They’re not alone in this. Corporate America seems to be on a constant mission to prove they have a soul; another firm I worked at, a global real estate company, cleaned out its basement one year and found four huge signed Andy Warhol line drawings just lying around. Apparently someone knew enough to buy them but couldn’t figure out what to do next.)

About six months ago I came into work to find a pile of rubble in my cube: long narrow shelving pieces, a power drill, bags of screws, and some cardboard boxes. At the time I sat in the corner of a hallway across from a glass-walled conference room. As I avoided stepping on the hammer under my desk while I sat down, a harried-looking guy with sawdust in his hair and a toolbelt around his waist came down the hall, followed by a tense-looking woman with long dark hair. The dark-haired woman was youngish and dressed as if she'd just stepped out of a Chelsea art gallery. Her dress was a flashy floral print and she wore thick black eyeliner and super-dark red lipstick; it was the kind of cliché I’d be embarrassed to make up, but here it stood in front of me. “Hi,” she said, in as supercilious a voice as I have ever heard at nine in the morning. “We’re installing a new piece in the conference room, and we need to work here now.”

“Here, like, in my cube here?” I asked.

And she rolled her eyes. She literally rolled her eyes at me. Bear in mind, I had just walked in the door, I had not had my coffee yet, and there was a pile of rubble in my cube—actually, at first there was a pile of rubble in my cube. Then there was a pile of rubble and two extra people, one shedding sawdust on my keyboard and one with an attitude which seemed to convey that a poll was taken amongst those in the know, and that I had been designated a harebrained nitwit who cannot understand art.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but no one said anything to me and I have to put something together for a meeting in two hours. Could you come back later?”

“Okay, sure,” said the carpenter. He unloaded more shelving into my cube. The dark-haired woman glared at me. I swear her nose twitched a little.

“And listen…” I said. “Is there somewhere else you could put this stuff? I need to be able to move in here.”

“Uh, where?” the carpenter asked. He wasn’t rude about it. She was rude; he was fine. He just didn’t seem all that bright. Or maybe, like me, he just didn’t give a damn about his job.

“How about there?” I said, pointing to the obviously unoccupied cube to my right. He looked at me for a split second with a kind of resignation. I felt bad making him move all his supplies, but it was true—I couldn’t get into my chair without knocking into a pile of hardware, let alone move once I was in it. He set to work ferrying the various pieces of equipment from my cube to the cube next door, resembling nothing so much as a worker ant. The dark haired woman watched him for a minute and turned to me, eyes glittering.

“Two hours,” she said. “We’ll be back.”

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Tune in for Part Two: Rohrshach's Revenge! Coming... you know, soon. In the meantime, wretched video. But great song: