Not exactly the way I'd want to start my day

Thanks to my new bestest friend forever, Zantac 75, I was finally able to get the stomach cramping to stop last night and get a decent night's sleep. Not to mention that other than being a little slow to get ready this morning, I was ready to get back to work. More on that later.

So as I'm driving down the highway to work, I get my customary 7:15 AM Joey call where he lets me know how dropoff at The Most Expensive Preschool in the Universe went and if he thinks Monkey Man is going to have a good or bad day (which you pretty much can tell when you do dropoff, right parents?). But today, of course, could not just be a normal day, right?

"It's a good thing I didn't get in a hurry to get to work this morning," said Joey, "because they found a dead guy in our parking lot this morning."

Uh, what?

Yup, their very own Dead Guy. And the city was doing so well on the homicide statistics this year (whereas last year we'd had two multiple murders within the first week of the year that rocked the city). Such a shame.

Joey went on to the office to find out what was going on and couldn't even get within 50 feet of the building. He parked the PimpMobile up the street at the convenience store and walked back down to talk to the police. Finally, after two hours, they moved the police tape so that at least the crews could get into the building and get their assignments and materials for the day. Lost revenue, people...ya always gotta think about lost revenue.

As it turns out, this white dude in his mid-20's was apparently beaten to death in the alley behind their shop. This alley is a known drug peddling area at night so actually we were pretty surprised that it had taken 12 years of them being in this location for something like this to happen. Yeah, we're optimists that way. But we don't actually know for sure what happened or if they have suspects or anything like that, and the odd thing is that Joey left his office around 7:30 last night and the police never even asked him for an interview. I guess they figured he wasn't skanking around in the alley and from that side of the building there aren't any windows so the chances of him hearing or seeing anything from where his office is was probably slim to none.

The area surrounding his office used to be one of the roughest areas in the city, rampant with crime and drugs. Then about 6 years ago the city went in and did a massive cleanup, demolishing a lot of the public housing and rebuilding decent homes and apartments that were affordable for low-income families who have done an amazing job keeping their homes up. Yes, the crack whores hang out on the corner outside their office on Fridays (Payday!) and Joey has even witnessed two of the - ahem - Ladies in a fistfight out in the street which is a totally hilarious story that can't even be put in writing and do it justice. Yes, there is a crack house about three blocks away from their office. It's not a nice place, but it had gotten better. About six months ago when the city police came and asked Joey if they could use one of the upstairs offices to do some surveillance, he got to talking to one of the officers and asked why they thought that the neighborhood bad guys hadn't bothered him or any of his employees. "Well," said the cop, "you guys employ people that give their money to them for drugs or sex. So if they hurt you, they hurt themselves." Kind of a sobering thought, huh?

And now this. I haven't lost many nights of sleep worrying about Joey working there. He's a big boy, he has street smarts, and he is very aware of his surroundings. But this hits a little close to home for me.

Why don't they move their office? I was asked this several times today. Well, when you work in an industry like we do where you have to have actual labor (versus people like general contractors who subcontract everything out, so all we have are supervisory-type positions), you have to stay close to your labor source. This means being on the bus line. This means being in locations that are less than savory, because Joey's business tends to employ people who are really the dregs of the industry. This means no Class-A office space in a lovely office park with fountains and swans.

It's days like today when I wish we could hock it all and move back to the country. But I'll be over it by tomorrow, because they don't have Panera there.

*****

And why, do you ask, was I anxious to get to work today? We had a new team member start today. Just so happens that the guy worked for a subcontractor of mine at one time and we did several projects together about 10 years ago.

Not to mention that I had an enormous crush on him. It was bad.

So of course, I was anxious to see what he was like after all that time had passed. So shoot me.

Well, after 10 years and being married twice and having 3 kids, I'd say he still looks pretty good but...well, you know. Kind of disappointing. The hotness factor is kind of gone. Such a pity.

*****

And just a small pat on the back to myself...

Today I got official notification that we got our LEED certification on the Big Corporate Headquarters Job that I finished back in October 2005. It was a long, arduous process, but it's all done and we should be having the award ceremony soon.

Now, if we could just get paid for the fucking building, that would be a whole other party in itself.