and I am SO not talking about NOLA (which is a stupid acronym for New Orleans because everyone knows it stands for Northeast Ohio Library Association I mean DUH).

The building I work in (and when I say “building” I mean “pile of crap layered with asbestos and human excrement with power outlets”) is about 76 years old, give or take a century. I'm pretty sure it was the old Materials Science building when Materials Science meant “Wood and Cement,” then it got taken over by chemists, then the electrical engineers moved in, and now I think it's actually part of the School of Biology and those of us left inside the building are actually part of someone's PhD dissertation, because every other week there are a bunch of air quality meters stuck to the wall slurping down the toxins that have caused all of my desk photos to fade. This seems to be the building where departments send the labs they don't like to die, and there are now about 17 different research fields represented in the various cubbyholes of Bunger-Henry (I shitteth thee not, that's the name); none of us know who the others are, but people still poke their heads in our door asking for directions to some lab that just moved here last week (or to the bathrooms, of which there are none on this floor). In fact I don't even remember to urinate on a given day until some moron wanders into my office and asks where the john is, despite the fact that there's a sign on my door at eye level with three different colors of highlighter making arrows pointing to the secret location of the goddamn bathrooms. Thank God for the gottapee morons.

All of this turnover in a building that Al Capone used to hide booze under makes for some serious renovation requirements. The comedian Gallagher once asked, “Why do they call 'em buildings when they're already done buildin' 'em? They oughta call 'em builts. Or crumblings.” The Bunger is some dynamic blend of the first and the last of those: it is in a constant state of decay and renewal, constant renovation. There has not been a single day since I've been here that some maintenance crew or another wasn't gutting walls, replacing ceilings, re-routing cables, walling up doors, knocking through panels, and always, always, drilling holes in something. It's like an active archeaological dig going on, and going on in reverse simultaneously. One month a bunch of chemical engineers will get banished to the Bunghole, and Facilities will send four burly boys in blue over here to install all the gas, air, water, ventilation and waste lines they need to do their work; after two solid months of deconstruction-reconstruction, the chemical engineers will be replaced by electrical engineers, and they'll send Facilities a whole new list demands for services, which is just the excuse the boys in blue need to bust out the jackhammers.

Someone is moving in next month, I have to guess, because today someone is drilling multiple holes into what sounds like a corrugated aluminum structure that is firmly attached one floor above me to the structure that my wall is part of. Thankfully, in order to keep the noise below insanity levels, they're drilling niiiiiice and sloooooow, so that instead of a brain-cracking buzz, my wall is emitting a low, steady rumble, like the sound you hear in the movies when submarines go down deeper than they were designed to. Yes, that's precisely it: it sounds like my building is falling to the ocean floor and about to implode. It's a very soothing sound, WAY better than last month when someone was drilling several dozen holes into the other side of the cinder blocks right next to my head; you just can't beat the screech of a masonry drill. Oh but WAIT! Ah, yes, now they're done with the drilling and have decided to start with the HAMMERING. HAMMERING METAL INTO METAL. And that crackly, sprinkly sound? That must be the sound of plaster from the ceiling crumbling and falling down onto the acoustice tiles above our heads — acoustic tiles which, thanks to the fact that someone 17 renovations ago didn't remove a defunct ventilation line to nowhere, are all stained brown and growing the deadly mold because our ceiling has a direct line to the open sky 4 floors up.

Rumble, rumble, pound pound pound. Tick tock, tick tock. Rumble, rumble, pound pound pound. Tick tock, tick tock. That's the sound of the men, workin' on the chain, gaaaayyyyaaaaannnng…

“Hey, do you know where the bathrooms are?”



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