Adapted and anonymized from an internal work email that was overcome by events and never sent:

Steve -

Wanted to give you some perspective on why Kristi sounded so odd during your phone call yesterday afternoon. It was indeed something you said, but you couldn't have known. Some background:

The architecture firm that is our current client is located in a lovely old ex-warehouse building at the corner of Retracted and Elided downtown. It's the building with the inexplicable "BUSINESS FURNITURE" sign running down it, just north of the big arena. Actually, it's a few different old buildings remodeled to operate as one.

Kristi's project team (and mine) sits on the top floor on the south side of the building. It's lovely space, built out by architects for knowledge workers - not your average prefab cube farm. The space was available to us because a major effort is spinning down - disused blueprints and architecture models of downtown are scattered all around our desks. We even have a skylight over the central conference table / walkway space.



[picture taken on an earlier snow day, when all save me were bright enough to work from home]

It's an old building, as I said. The roof, apparently, is a bit cranky to maintain - the thick locked steel door giving stairway access to the roof has a laser-printed sign confirming this theory. The sign threatens instant termination to any contractors smoking on the roof, due to the incredible expense a cigarette burn causes in repairs.

Also apparently: when you put a skylight on the south side of a heated building, there's a greenhouse effect that can lead to unexpected snow melt even when the outdoor temperature is in the teens.

I noticed a consequence of all this Wednesday, walking to my desk, when a cold drop of water soaked through my thinning hair. I looked up, and sure enough, the roof was leaking, right at the skylight overhead.

I knew what to do from previous snow days: I grabbed a trashcan to put under the leak - but the water was coming down from everywhere. I put out the call to the team, and soon we had found a sufficient number of trashcans to catch the gallons we had pouring in. (Four, I believe, though the picture only caught two.)



It wasn't until we all were seated again (and Kristi was catching your call) that we wondered why there was such a wide area of dampness. Seemed to us that the runoff would come out at one spot, right? So we looked up...



Yes, the high-design fluorescent fixtures that light our days seem to serve as a fine conduit for running water, just as it does with the electricity. Being goofball technical guys, we were having a running conversation about how dangerous that was, at the same time we were standing tiptoe trying to reach the dripping metal, to touch it and see if we could be shocked. It was at about this point in your conversation that Kristi started laughing and saying to you "I'll tell you later."

I understand you were telling her of hearing how marvelous our facilities were, just at the moment when she began to laugh. And really, they are - building maintenance took care of it all within minutes, once someone finally decided to tell them of the problem, and we've all spent enough days working at folding tables on broken chairs to appreciate the good stuff we have here.

Still, I thought you deserved a longer and more visual explanation than you got. Really, we're all fine here.

It was just another odd day at the client site.