Grown Up Stuff Sucks Sometimes
I'm at work, and I really want to be at home. I have a client at 7:00pm, so I have to be here until at least 8:00pm. To make it worse, I'm not even at my own office. I'm in a satellite office 30 miles south of my house. So, when I leave work tonight, I'll have a half hour drive ahead of me before I can collapse on to my couch and stare at the ceiling in peace.
There is something fundamentally lonely about being the last person leaving a huge, dark, empty building, and walking across the vacant parking lot to a solitary car, which is parked at the far end of a vast expanse of nothingness.
I can picture the scene now. I can hear my voice echoing as I yell, "Hello?" But, alas, this unrequited greeting will hang in the air, and I will sigh and slump into the driver's seat of my car in the post-dusk gloom of an empty office complex, start my engine, and drive off to where the people are, at last.
There is something fundamentally lonely about being the last person leaving a huge, dark, empty building, and walking across the vacant parking lot to a solitary car, which is parked at the far end of a vast expanse of nothingness.
I can picture the scene now. I can hear my voice echoing as I yell, "Hello?" But, alas, this unrequited greeting will hang in the air, and I will sigh and slump into the driver's seat of my car in the post-dusk gloom of an empty office complex, start my engine, and drive off to where the people are, at last.
posted by Bert at 6:35 PM
2 Comments:
Blech - you work so late! I hope it's not that way every evening.
One time I was working out of one of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's bureaus out in the distant suburbs. I had to go to a night meeting and then drove to the buro in the freezing cold night, unlocked it, and went in to file the story. Then I went to the bathroom in the hall and managed to lock myself out of the office. I freaked out because my purse was in there, so how was I going to drive the hour and a half back to my parents' house in Kenosha? It was probably about 10 p.m. I left a couple of desperate messages on the buro editors home answering machine asking him to drive to the buro and let me in so I could go home. Then I remembered that I had left the keys in the car since I was in the middle of friggin nowhere. Oh my god it was so embarrassing. Fortunately the buro editor was already asleep and didn't hear the messages until morning. I got kidded about it the next day, but if he would have left his warm bed to drive out there to save me and I didn't even need saving, I wouldn't be alive to tell the story today. I'd have expired from embarrassment on the spot.
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