Todd Stadler's blog

What is the sound of one hand warming itself?

The Haseltine Building, where I work, is old.

And when I say "old", I mean it in the "seventy-year-old car" sense, rather than the "grand tradition of democracy" sense. And when I say "seventy-year-old car", what I mean is this: it may look cool from the outside, given that it looks nothing like what they make today, but you wouldn't want to spend large chunks of time inside, because functionality rarely lasts as long as style.

Look, the point is that the Haseltine Building can be somewhat crummy at times, or, as real estate agents say, "charming".

The main thing that one notes is lacking in the building is anything that resembles earthquake-proofing. Or, at least, this is what one would note, along with a ton of bricks hurtling towards one, if and when the inevitable Big Earthquake hits Portland.

Of course, if El Grande 8.0 comes a-knockin' while I'm at work, I'll at least have the comfort of having snuffed it in a historic building. Or possibly an historic building. Not sure. I'll have to work that out as I hurtle towards the ground floor.

But it's difficult to get any work done if one focuses too hard on such morbid thoughts, so instead we at work while away our time being annoyed by less mortally perilous features of the building, such as its heating/cooling system.

A while back, the building manager made a big to-do about the new heating/cooling system he had installed. Workers with very tall ladders came and interrupted our work schedules in very exciting ways. We were told: the new system is computer-operated! Each floor can be programmed independently!

And I suppose, in a way, the new system has turned out to be an improvement. Before it was installed, our office was always too hot in the winter, or too cold in the summer. This was, we were told, because the thermostat was located in the seating area of the Thai restaurant on the first floor — notably, three floors below our office — and when it was hot outside, the system needed to produce cold air, and vice versa. Now I'm all for people eating their pla tod lad prik in comfort, but it was never clear why this resulted in my having to wear a sweater in the office when people outside were sweating.

But like I said, the new system improved things — our discomfort became seasonally correct. So it was that when a cold snap hit Portland this week, it was chilly in the office, causing a few of us to ask our operations manager to complain to the building manager. (Apparently, the building manager only allows one appointed person in each office — in our case, the operations manager, the poor soul — to communicate with him; I assume that this is because otherwise he would be busy all day dealing with complaints.)

Now, I used the phrase "poor soul" a few words back because the building manager has a reputation for being difficult at times. It's almost as if he read in a book somewhere that being transparent (that is, open and honest) is a good thing, and so he strove for transparency (that is, having a minimal impact on one's sensory input). Ha!

As an example, when our operations manager faxed the building manager, asking him, "Can you fix the baseboard heater on the western wall? It doesn't work," he replied, "You just need to turn it on." As it turns out, we had thought of that trick before faxing him, and it was, in fact, our attempting to turn on the baseboard heater that had led to our concluding that it was broken. This, in turn, led to our desire to have the heater fixed.

Not that it matters. Even when the building manager understands a problem, he usually tries a Jedi Mind Trick™ — "These are not the solutions you're looking for" and all that.

So when the people in the office next door, apparently as cold as we were, tried to plug in a space heater and blew the circuit for their office (and, conveniently, my desk), our operations manager faxed the building manager to ask, "Can you fix the circuitry so that a space heater in the office next door doesn't blow the circuit in our office?"

To which he replied, "That is intentional. The building would burn down if people were allowed to plug in anything, anywhere." It's possible he was trying to warn us that the building is also highly flammable, in addition to being poorly wired and too cold, but I assume he was merely trying a take on the old saw, "it's a feature, not a bug". What isn't clear is why he hasn't gone the extra mile and put the entire building on one 120-volt circuit, thereby providing maximum safety, as well as energy efficiency! After all, you can't waste power if nothing turns on.

But in the midst of all my sarcastic observation, I paused. What if the building manager wasn't being lazy? What if I simply misunderstood the point of his replies? After all, the way in which he turned our circuit complaint back on us, morphing it into a plead for safety, was almost jujitsoid in nature. Was the building manager hinting at a deeper, more Oriental philosophy?

I pondered this as our operations manager faxed another complaint, this time about the seemingly unnecessary amount of cold air being blown into our cold office on such a cold November day. She wrote, "Can the cold air blowing out of the vents be stopped?"

And when the building manager replied, "There is no cold air blowing before 11:00 a.m.," I realized the genius in his thinking — he was not merely talking about the heating/cooling system of a downtown building, but was instead espousing a neo-nihilistic philosophy, expressed through simple koans. "You complain about the cold air," he said, "But your perceptions are necessarily temporal — consider the cold air that is not, and there you will find peace."