Breaking Zen
In a cavernous space, water creeps silently along the floor. The leading edge of the growing, globular shape glistens in dim light. It finds and dips into every concrete imperfection. It seeps into raw 2×4’s. The fluid expands around pebbles. It is only slightly hampered by rubber bumpers where the berber carpet begins.
Slowly, steadily it moves toward her work area. The managers in the nearby offices already vacated their soaked spaces, exiting into the hall.
She remains rigid in the dark, fixated on her still-electrified monitor, and focused on her heavy workload burden. She takes every minute possible to push one more email and one more file, before the water arrives and renders her useless. This was not the first time where time ran away from her, pinched by unnatural disaster.
Somewhere in the distance, the growl of the on-premise power generator hovers just below consciousness. There was power enough for the computers, but not the lights. Luckily, the sun outside peeked through faraway windows.
Welcome Back My Friends, To The Warehouse
Once again, she found herself in the lowest rent side of town. At a web agency in the warehouse district, standing defiant in a space of their own rough-and-tumble making, filled with budget scraps and growing client demands.
Going back to the warehouse meant power outages and damp, but also something uncommon. Picture a zen garden, complete with gravel floor covering, concrete pagodas, and a bridge made of plywood over a pebble riverbed. A calming scene.
Except when it’s flooded with pee water from the nearby overflowing toilet, and that pee water is slowly approaching your cube.
Still, she was one of the fortunate ones. Following a hot tip from her mentor, she scaled the layoff cliff. It took only a mere few weeks to haul herself back up to this next threshold, after exiting her workplace utopia.
Inch by inch, she monitors the approaching flood in her peripheral vision. At one point she decides it’s time to pick the desktop tower up from the floor. Pulling at every power cord and connector, the heavy lump of tech is raised to a safe perch.
Through it all, she repeats a mantra: I’m lucky to have this job. Lucky. Lucky. At the same time, the situation begged for an answer: Is the “cash-strapped sweatshop in a warehouse” the only viable business model for web work?
Why yes, at least in the early 2000’s after the dot-com boom and bust.
To add insult to injury, with desktops, working from home was not yet an option for the typical tech worker of the era.
Escape impossible, there she stayed: purse up on a shelf, water engulfing her rubber soles. Only then, did the water stop advancing, leaving a soaked carpet to squish upon for the rest of the afternoon. In her peripheral, she catches the sweaty Facilities guy wiping his brow, feet squeaking away down the hall.
What adventures remain back at the warehouse? Stay tuned!
In the mean time, revisit the nostalgic fun of our earliest warehouse memories, and travel even deeper back in time to Merlin (the finicky file server).
As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.
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