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getting to keep my key
Monday, January 31 2022
Today I had to drive over to the office in Red Hook because I thought I'd be turning in my office key to work remotely from then on. So in the late morning I prepared to leave, with the idea that I would be taking the Chevy Bolt (I'd told Gretchen to take Powerful's Prius to her bookstore shift). But then it turned out that Powerful also had a doctor's appointment. He's not supposed to be driving still, but he occasionally does. So I told him to take the Forester, which is more his style (that is, big) than the other cars anyway.
I entered Red Hook from the west on Route 199 (instead of the usual way, from the south on US 9) with the hope of stopping at Bubby's for what I thought would be my last work-related burrito. But it turns out Bubby's is closed on Mondays. So I didn't end up eating any lunch at all.
For pandemic times, there were a lot of people in the office, but not as many as expected. It turned out that Cameron, the one woman in the company, had quit some time between the late-October retirement party for the head honcho and now. And on my side of the office it was just Jason and Jon (the latter the Delphi developer with Eeyore as his spirit animal). But Bill was here, and later Marcus, Richard, and Marc showed up, followed by Joe, the IT guy who once had that terrible commute from near the Neversink Reservoir (I hadn't seen him in nearly two years). It was hard to focus on work with all the activity (tinged with uncertainty) taking place in the office. Eventually one of the big cheeses from the corporate conglomerate arrived, and everyone who used to work on the municipal services side of the office was shepherded upstairs for a mysterious meeting, one that the three of us in the tax department were only allowed to join belatedly. The story of what was happening today turned out to be a little different from what we'd been led to believe. It seems the part of the company that did municipal services was actually being sold to a totally different company, one outside the corporate conglomeration we'd all been part of for the last three years. They were all being asked to turn in their keys because they would no longer have access to the office and would presumably be working from home for their new employer from now on. As for the three of us in the old tax deparment (Jason, Jon, and me), we still worked for the corporate conglomerate and would still have access to the office (including the upstairs one) until the lease ran out in April. On the matter of all the stuff in the office, it was all considered "junk" and would be divvied up among the employees present today. The most valuable resources seemed to be computer monitors (that is, screens), though there was also some interest in the decorative muncipality-related signs as well as the glass doors hanging on steel tracks that had been installed as makeshift moveable partitions. Gretchen had already put in a request for a nice stapler if things came to this, so I got her a quality Swingline model.
Meanwhile, since the domain name for my work email address was now owned by a competitor, I was transitioned to a new one, which threw a monkey wrench into all the permissions I'd been requesting and and slowly accumulating from my new workplace within the corporate conglomerate (but in Boston).
All the people in the office was creating so much of a workplace distraction, as well as a risk of covid infection, that I departed promptly at 4:00pm. Most of my soon-to-be-former colleagues were wearing masks, but not all the time, and not everybody.
Back in Hurley, I made a spaghetti dinner with tofu, mushrooms, onions, and spinach, as well as a little broccoli cooked with the pasta. But then it turned out that Gretchen had gotten take-out from the Garden Café while she was in Woodstock. But my hankering was still for spaghetti, so that was what I had for dinner while Gretchen and I watched an old episode of Shark Tank (we'd watched all the recent episodes of Jeopardy!).
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