To the Strains of Nick Lowe

I work in a five story office building-not exactly 'a towers over the landscape' edifice or a landmark one might offer 'take at left at' to a lost traveler, but tall enough to leap over Superman in a single bound. As I said, we're an office building, so lots of desks, chairs, file cabinets and such. 

I started my work week with an early morning discovery that one of the window walls in a hallway  near my office had been turned into a sprained glass window. I thought at first perhaps over the weekend a (very large) bird (or very small airplane) had flown into it, causing the crackle but no snap or pop effect that I was viewing at the time.

Mind you, I don't find this style of glass to be without charm. Way more translucent than transparent, admittedly, but then again who isn't these days? However, I can also understand how the people who run the building fear the effect could get old very quickly. After we in the minion brigade had spent  hours daydreaming and postulating on what could have happened vice attempting to research what had actually happened here's what we had arrived at: the outside heat on the surface of the dual pane glass, when met by the chilled air from within the building, shattered the window whose frame is all that keeps the fragments from being showered all over us hapless bipeds.

I like that idea-dramatic with the added advantage of being pseudo-scientific without the burden of requiring any actual science or scientific proof. Of course when you point out that only the inside pane, where only the cool air is, is all crinkly and wrinkly but not the outside part where all the heated air is hanging out, I don't have a second cause, unless you count sinister force and I play that card an awful lot for someone who has lived his entire life within a short commute of the Age of Reason.

So here it is later in the same week, and the provisional repair would make the John Hancock (not the BIG lettering guy, the other one) Tower in Boston proud. We've traded Windex for Pledge (of course they're both from "S.C. Johnson, a family company") so it's all good (I guess), unless you're actually trying to see something out the window in which case not so much.

I'm starting a collection to purchase a set of water colors and brushes so selected staff, preferably those with their own berets and smocks, can treat the new, blank surface as an invitation to paint whatever kind of day they imagine is happening on the other side of the wooden plank. I hope someone knows how to draw a pony because I'm thinking this maybe as close to that ride as I'm going to get for a long time to come.
-bill kenny