Last One Out

I’m sure going to miss those views.

I returned to my office on Monday for the last time to clean out my desk as my company completes the move to a virtual workspace.

I have the week off and since I don’t feel like risking a run-in with COVID-19, I’m doing yet another stay-cation.

In February 2020, we had moved from our old and spooky location on Wall Street to this wonderful new facility in Brookfield Place overlooking the Hudson River.

We were up on the 27th Floor and we had spectacular views of the city from every window.

I posted photos of the place on Facebook and told everybody and his brother that I couldn’t wait for spring when I would eat lunch outside by the water. It was going to be great.

Two weeks later we shut down the office in response to COVID-19.

Most of us believed at the time that the closure would be brief. We’d return to the office—and normal life—in a few weeks, maybe a few months, at most.

But the body count and infection rates climbed and working from home became the norm.

Management held on to the property for over a year and there was some discussion of returning to the office this month.

Last month, however, the company announced it was shutting down its real-world operations and advised us to stop by the office and clean out our desks.

The walk up from the ferry on Monday felt like a march through a ghost town, as I passed nearly a dozen empty stores, including the New York Club branch at City Hall.

I met a lot of great people and had a lot of brutal workouts at that place. Now I’ve adjusted my membership from the city-wide pass to just my local NYSC gym in Bay Ridge.

Time Capsule

I'm fearful about New York’s future and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about a 1972 song called American City Suite.

The song is actually a medley of three separate tunes that track the deterioration of New York City in the Seventies.

The last part, called “A Friend is Dying,” talks about no one knowing “if she can make it through the night.”

The city has survived disaster before and come back and I really hope it rises from this latest blow. And we’ve had some good news, including the return of Broadway.

But it’s hard to be optimistic when I walked into that painfully empty office.

I felt like an archeologist entering a recently unearthed tomb.

My old work station looked exactly as it did when I walked out 18 months ago.

I saw the sign I pinned to my desk declaring “The Truth is My Light,” my motto for 2020, when I had decided in January that it was going to be a great year.

I found the three two-liter bottles of diet soda under my desk, which I bought last year. I must’ve thought I’d be back soon to pick them up, but I’m going to leave them for the clean-up crew.

That crap is bad enough when it’s brand new; God knows what a year’s isolation had done to the contents.

Opening my drawer, I found my old navy-blue sweatshirt that I used to put on when the air conditioning went up to high and my Colorado coffee mug I had gotten from my brother and his wife in Fort Collins.

I put the stuff I wanted to keep in my backpack and a reusable shopping bag and got ready to leave. But I had to take a walk around the floor.

Lights came on rows of empty desks as I set off motion detectors with my steps; I saw signs of stalled activity everywhere I looked.

I recalled how excited I felt when we first moved in here. The company had such big plans for this place.

I stopped to take a one last look out the window. The views are still incredible, but the world down below has changed forever.