Smoke Gets in Our Eyes

The federal government spent years and a peepot full of money throwing up (in every sense of the term) an office building for 1,700 federal workers, including R Man, but not me in a dicey part of downtown. It's very green including natural ventilation that replaces air conditioning on most floors and elevators that stop only on every third floor, making employees use stairs to reach floors in-between. R Man initially hated it, but seems more resigned to it. Today may have changed that.

This was only his second day back in the office and he was looking forward to it; he is plenty sick of being stuck here at home, enough so that returning to work was appealing. Imagine. We drove in instead of taking BART and would have parked in a garage next door to his office, but there was a fire on Mission across the street from the building and the road was closed. We parked somewhere else and both of us headed off to work.

After I had been at my desk for only about a half hour, a woman I work with came by to mention she had gotten an email announcing they were evacuating the federal building because smoke from the fire was pouring in through the fabulously natural ventilation system. I called R Man who was just then reading an email from his boss telling everyone to hit the road. So we're back home hanging around. R Man is not happy.