Deep Dim Downtown Office

While Obama is cracking jokes about how his detractors are missing the point, I am deeply involved with my new client down on Hudson Street near the Passport Office.

Very little natural light makes it in from the two walls of windows.  The cubicles irregularly shaped and arranged in an ad-hoc abandoned honeycomb pattern.  I sit at one of several steel tables half a foot too high.  My neighbor, who’s name I immediately forgot, is a freelance front-end coder.  He is young and seems far too happy to be an HTML programmer.  Sometimes he can’t contain his excitement at how “neat” his own code is.  Planning his own obsolescence…  But he, being relatively neat, tall, good looking, personable, and clean, is not what I would usually imagine a programmer to be.  Based on this and my last office experience a few weeks ago, I am starting to detect that the breed of geek who works at these ad or interactive agencies is not at all the same as the antisocial, dirty, drug-obsessed geeks I am used to.

Behind me, in the dark cavernous space, full-time employees in the production division exchange the latest technology gossip.  They swear a good amount and talk in authoritative voices a few steps too deep for their natural range.  Today, my third (and second-to-last) day, I made my second presentation, this time to the accounts department.  The head account woman picked cucumbers out of her gourmet deli salad and alternated between twiddling her Blackberry and iPhone, interjecting occasionally with justifications for why the high-profile system I am designing should not do anything different from what has been done previously.  I agree entirely, but unfortunately, I must keep myself entertained.