Identical Cousins

As I was eating my lunch in the break room hiding behind the Pepsi machine,

“Oh, are you eating inside today?”
“Yes.”
"You always eat outside.”
“It’s cold out.”
"Really? It’s sunny…"
“Yes, and windy”.
"The sun is out"
“It is still cold.”
"But you normally eat outside, right?"
“Unless it’s cold and windy”
"Or raining?"
“Yes. Cold, windy or rainy.”
"So, you’re kind of like a weather vain?".
“Yes.”

After they finally left me to my lunch, I noticed out the window that the building next door seemed to be on fire. I went out to the secretaries’ office and pointed this out. Someone said they thought it was steam. We decided it was probably steam, but that maybe they didn’t know about it. Two of us took it upon ourselves to go to the building next door and let them know that there was steam billowing out of their basement where no steam had billowed out before - Because we’re helpful like that and we wanted to see if that building really was so much nicer then ours as had been reported.

We approach the building and discover a very nice front porch and deck furniture. We don’t have deck furniture! We don’t have a deck either, but that is beside the point. The buildings are identical on the outside other then the exciting deck we had discovered. “They redid this building you know said my fellow detective. ”They redid it for the residents and made it nice and then they moved them out. They won’t spend a dime on us”.. Bastards, I thought.

Then we went inside. They have a proper entry way! much nicer then what we have but decorated in the same cheap ass knock together furniture that they use here when they are going for "homey" instead of "psychiatric hospital". They had a handy "visiting room", which would be a nice plain old "waiting room" for our use instead of visitors to our building just standing around in the middle of the hallway or wandering around lose.

We went through the door into where we hoped there would be some one to talk to about the steam issue, we were struck by how clean it smelled. Maybe a little hospitalish but clean. Our building does not smell like clean. Our building just smells. I would be find with a little Eue de bleach if it meant the building didn’t smell like three week old Eue de Burned Popcorn. It’s gross. The building next door also has pretty tile floors instead of the Eisenhower era carpets that we have. They are filthy and no doubt harbor all kinds of scary things. On the upside though, due to the years this building spent as a psych ward, if you are having a bad day, the carpet is held together with generations of particulate from decades of crushed tranquilizers and if you go face down on it you can get stoned enough not to care very, very fast.

In the other building it appeared that they also clean the floors regularly. We have to wait for a new hole to open in the ceiling before our carpets get any attention. No joke. If Gawd doesn’t see fit to shampoo our carpets neither does housekeeping

The other building seemed to have working lights in the hallway. I wanted to cry. As we were standing there feeling unloved but well lit, a guy came up and said “I bet you two are lost or looking for something!”, we answered that “No, we were not lost or looking for something, that what we wanted was to tell him his building was billowing and maybe he should check that out”. He said “Oh, its just steam”. Okay then.

I’ve worked in this building for four years and I’ve never seen billowing steam happen before. We walked back to our sad, dark, smelly building and decided that maybe they never properly heated the building next door and maybe we did have it one up on the residents. Then we noticed that we don’t have a deck or deck furniture or floors you could eat off and went back to hating our building.