Sometimes I honestly don’t know why they made this building out of big old cinder blocks in the first place. They should have made it out of cheese, or balsa wood, or maybe just big Ziploc bags full of dog crap. Any of those things would have made it easier for them to drill all their holes through the floors and walls and everything else, and I betcha the bags of dog crap would’ve done a better job keeping out the rain.

Yes, it sometimes rains in my office. Has for at least three years. It’s nice to hear the sound of the rain while you work, though it’s really more of a drip-plunk, drip-plunk, drip-plunk than a proper rainy sound, but beggars can’t be choosers. We should just be happy we have a spare garbage can to collect it all in. Sometimes, a maintenance guy will come into the office during a rainstorm, look at the brown, leaking hole in our ceiling, look at the garbage can, and look at us to ask, “That’s still leaking?” It’s nice that he pretends to care, but no number of trips and flashlights and minutes spent in intense, contemplative brow-furrowed staring have ever determined what makes the rain from four storeys up come all the way down here.

I think it might be all the holes they drill.

You see, another nice thing about cinder block construction is the way it insulates against noise. And by insulates I mean propagates, when the source of that noise is in direct physical contact with the cinder blocks, like, say, you’d have when workmen are drilling more holes into the floor or the wall or the ceiling anywhere in this quadrant of the building. I only mention the drilling because they’re doing it right now, as I sit here trying to think about gap elements for cohesive crack modeling so that I might salvage my doomed-ass dissertation research, running on two hours of sleep, two granola bars, two slices of pizza, and two quarts of coffee. It’s my own fault, really. I should know better than to come to work on a weekday afternoon. They only drill on weekday afternoons, unless it happens to be a weekday morning. Then they also drill. And the pizza, incidentally, I believe is slowly killing my kidneys with the melamine; that was so not a microwave-safe plastic plate. But don’t worry, I gave the rest to the dog.

On very special days? They also hammer. Clap clap clap, buuuuzzzzzzzzzzzz. Clap clap clap, bu-buzzzz, bu-bu-buzzzzzzz. BuhRRRRRrrrrrr, buhRRRRRrrrrr. Clap clap. Kerthud. Whatever it was they done drilled and hammered into the wall, it done gone kerthud. And so they drill some more.

There’s an even chance that they’re almost done doing whatever it is they’re doing, because they’ve been doing it since about 1999, from what I’ve heard. Such dedication: they will not rest as long as a single cinder block doesn’t have a hole in it. Who knew when they built Bunger-Henry in 1642 that a mere 350 years later someone would invent this thing called the internet, which requires that drill-bearing workmen install 6 miles of blue patch cable in every office? Had they known that back then, they surely would have made the building out of cheese.

A building made of cheese might also make it easier to look for the cracks in the floors and ceilings. With the right kind of cheese, a good strong flashlight oughta tell ya whether you’ve got problems with your flooring. But with this damn cinder block, they gotta use them x-rays. X-rays, if you haven’t heard, are bad for your gonads. Make your babies all funky and such, or maybe make no babies ‘tall. Not sure which one of them I’m rootin’ for, but either way, I’ve got the funky gonads on account of the x-rayin’. Much like coming to work on a weekday and not expecting all the drillin’, I made the fool mistake of going up the stairs to take a pee (we have to go upstairs to do our business in this building, even though every year or two that same business comes a’bubblin’ out of the ground floor anyway where there’s no bathrooms to begin with), and curse my dumb skull I forgot to ask anyone if I could walk out the other end of the stairwell without getting x-rayed. See, they’ve only got three Danger Radiation Area signs on their traveling x-ray squad, so when they was x-rayin’ through the ceiling in the hall at the top of the stairs, they had to pick a point of access that wasn’t gonna get no sign, and obviously the chose the stairwell. I shoulda realized faster what all them signs said, hanging on pieces of yellow tape stretched across the three halls with their backs to me. They were saying I was on the wrong side of the signs getting my gonads x-rayed. And here I didn’t have the sense to get out of the way or even bend spacetime so I could read ‘em from behind.

But I have to wonder, if they weren’t always drilling so many holes in the building, you think maybe they wouldn’t have to be x-raying the floors through my gonads lookin’ for cracks? I’m just sayin’.

Buzzzzzzzzz.



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