I worked in a company that tried its best to emulate the typical new economy company, complete with its unruly employees, cancerous and unreasonable growth, lots of big talk, and among many other things toys in the office. The Austin Branch took pride in having a certain time of day set aside for nerf wars and late night Quake tournaments. In fact, so many employees spent so much time goofing around that we all ended up spending every waking hour at work to catch up with our endless diversions and unrealistic totally overblown milestones.
The New York office was no different. However, by the time I was relocated to the New York office, the economy was already slowly tanking. The pipeline was so empty you could see tomorrow through it and tomorrow did not look good. There were constant rumors of pending layoffs. Will it be this Friday? No, it will be Monday. If not Monday, well it may be Tuesday because it is right before the end of the quarter. In this "sobering" environment all the toys had been cast off to one of the lower unoccupied floors in the hopes that quitting the fooling around would somehow increase our chances of getting new clients and keeping our jobs.
During my lunch breaks, I would go through this huge conference room full of toys trying to find something entertaining to get my mind off, however briefly, of the horrible project I was working on. During one of these excursions, I saw a familiar shape and color towards one of the back corners of the room. Was that really a box of LEGO blocks? Yes it was!
I quickly salvaged it and brought it up to our office work area. At the time I did not worry about a layoff hitting me. I thought to myself; "They just paid 20 odd thousand dollars to relocate me here, there's no way they're going to let me go anywhere in less than 2 years. I was wrong but as I said, I did not know better back then.
This is how my recent prolonged addiction to LEGO started. Several of my office mates also were into LEGO blocks. I remember many of our hopelessly long meetings ending with some sort of a game involving LEGO blocks. Our culture was screwed up, the New York office's culture was worse and the combination of the two was just vile. We all needed an escape and mine was these miniature towers I started building during my lunch breaks.
The first few ones I built were lame but then I suddenly developed a style: It involved over-emphasized verticality conveyed through alternating "floor" colors. Using two different colors created structures that conveyed floors that human eye could recognize even from a distance. Using two different colors of blocks also had another advantage: taller structures thanks to twice the number of pieces. I went from building completely solid towers to more and more shell like structures that housed a significant amount of empty space in them. Creating the voids within the tower created lighter structures as well as allowing me to build taller. Through trial and error, I became pretty experienced in making tall ziggurat-like stepped structures reminiscent of most New York high-rises.
I must admit that I spent most of the summer pre-occupied with my LEGO towers when I should have been paying more attention to the Flash Presentation we were preparing for Deutsche Bank. In all honesty, the presentation was as entertaining as watching paint dry and I had long lost interest in the endless stream of corporate mumbo-jumbo we had come up with for our client through endless hours of fruitless meetings that to me felt like the intellectual equivalent of having bamboo sticks drawn under my fingernails.
Soon I was out of LEGO blocks and in a fit of insanity, I went and bought us another box. A month later towards the end of August 2001, in an effort to increase my engagement in the project, my crazy but well-meaning project manager bought me one more of the same tub of 4000 pieces. I was in LEGO heaven; I had more pieces than I knew what to do with.
Well, you know what happened next.
After 9/11, we were back at the office pretty soon, a little too soon. I was back at work on Thursday of that same week. Considering my commute path had literally been destroyed and now it took me about an hour and half to get to work, just like the other crazies at my work place I was going to work everyday as if nothing actually happened. I now believe we were experiencing some sort of denial. We all figured, if we kept busy, perhaps then all of this mess across Hudson that played like a bad 9/11 DVD day and night through our endless floor to ceiling windows would somehow stop. But it didn't. The site kept smoldering for weeks, as we stared on like campers on the skirts of Mt. St. Helens. A gaping hole, a steam that ever changed direction and strange metallic sounds growling as the heavy machinery worked at the site. The reality did not stop, though we buried our heads deeper into the fictional drama of our project deadlines and goals.
I disassembled all of my towers and started working on a way too big model of the World Trade Center Towers. This model was so big I would need at least 3-4 4000-piece tubs to complete it. I felt compelled to recreate them in some shape or form. Perhaps many people felt the same thing, despite the fact that most of us did not find the two towers all that aesthetically pleasing.
Three or four weeks after 9/11 I gave up on trying to build the models. Our clients were finally out of the mess they had fallen into when the south tower fell onto their headquarters in New York and put all their vitals systems offline. Once I abandoned the WTC model idea, I went back to building the same type of towers; Though I must admit, the towers I was building were much taller and larger --thanks in part to the number of blocks at my disposal and our communal need to make up for the drastic decrease in phallic objects in our proximity.
In a couple of months I ended up with a large block of fairly good-looking designs, each with its unique edge and story. Until I got laid off I dragged this large block of 3-4 foot towers around the office as our team kept getting moved every 2-3 weeks. Every time we moved, people came to watch. They wanted to see how the city was moved they said -- I think they wanted to see if we would take a wrong step and drop the whole thing by accident.
The day before we all got laid off, I already knew we were all toast so I broke the tall towers into neat segments and packed them all. The next day, as I expected, I got laid off along with the rest of the people that were relocated from Austin. I told my project manager that I considered the LEGO city to be mine as a parting gift. He did not object. When I got home from work, the first thing I did was to assemble the city back together.
By the time I was done, it was clear to me: I was an unemployed alien worker in New York City living in a $2200 rent apartment in Manhattan at the worst possible time -- right after the biggest terrorist attack in US history.
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