The bad building

The bad building

by Garrison Frost

Everyone agreed that it was a bad building.

Even those who worked for the large governmental institution that had purchased this building in downtown Los Angeles with full knowledge of its many defects would admit – albeit quietly, looking over their shoulders – that is was deeply flawed. Unlike those folks, we didn't work for the large governmental institution. We were just tenants, so we could be open in our assessment. Are there were plenty of assessment.

From certain windows of our bad building, we could see the gems of the downtown – the shining Disney Hall, the timeless City Hall, Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral – but we didn't envy these high-profile structures. No, our envy was for more prosaic structures all around us that no one ever noticed, where the elevators worked, the lights stayed on and the ventilation system didn't send us home every day with sore throats. To work in one of those buildings was a dream of ours.

We occupied an entire floor of the bad building, well above the 20th floor, and yet there were days when we would rather have used ropes to get there than the elevators. The elevators were so slow and so crowded that people would just jump into any one with space, regardless of whether it was going in the direction they wanted. People had learned that it actually saved time to ride up 15 floors to go down two. If anything, this experience made us more tolerant of the rush hour traffic in the downtown. When it takes you 25 minutes just to exit your building in the evening, crawling down the Harbor Freeway doesn't seem so bad. And at least on the freeway, you had some likelihood of eventually reaching your destination. In the bad building, hardly a day went by when someone wasn't trapped on an elevator. Few workday miseries could top a two-floor freefall followed by 30 minutes of claustrophobic agony in a dark box with 11 strangers. It got even better when the impatient security person on the other end of the emergency phone impatiently put us on hold, so bored they were with yet another person "claiming" to be trapped in an elevator. You never got an elevator without first going to the bathroom, and it was always a good idea to bring some food along: a candy bar, a bottle of water, a bag of grain perhaps.

This was the same crack security staff that insisted upon escorting all delivery personnel upstairs while letting everyone else pass without scrutiny. Terrorist, according to their manual, never disguise themselves as regular people. This, coupled with their regular announcements that the building has been inspected and that all was safe – when we had never heard anything to indicate that it might not have been – had us feeling pretty much on our own in any emergency.

While the elevators were frightening, other material aspects of the bad building were simply annoying. This included our ventilation system, which was guided by placebo thermostats perennially fixed to "way too hot" or "way too cold." Occasionally the vents emit an inexplicable burning smell that mysteriously disappeared when maintenance arrived to tell the people that the air conditioning certainly wasn't the cause of their allergies.

The floors of the bad building weren't level, which wasn't a major problem unless you were the type of person who obsessed over how such engineering details might affect the building's ability to survive a major earthquake, such as the one from the newly discovered fault that ran right under it. Lots to think about while walking uphill to the bathroom where the lights – prone to switching on and off on their own – often left us fumbling for toilet paper in the dark.

Earthquake aside, the tilted floors provided a jolly funhouse effect where tall people at one end of rooms appear short, and vice versa, as well as occasional excitement when a sudden downward tilt near a window gave you the feeling that the building is trying to eject you.

Early on, my biggest beef with the bad building was the crowds of cigarette-wielding employees huddled around every entrance, forcing me to hold my breath upon entering and leaving. But eventually I came to sympathize with these folks. Given the stresses, why would anyone who worked there quit smoking? Who could if they wanted to? It was amazing more people didn?t take up the habit. And given the strange airs coming out of the ventilation system, the cigarette smoke was probably an improvement.

When we finally moved our offices out of the bad building, it was cause for celebration. But that celebration soon turned to regret. We got on the elevators for the last time, and upon seeing the others, the ones we were leaving behind, I had something of a "Schindler's List" moment. If only we could have saved more.

(June 18, 2005)