A Few Minutes' Rest in a Company Cafeteria

So I came back to Oregon, just like last week, just like next week. Oregon has become my workplace away from workplace. Indeed, I’m really beginning to feel at workplace here. A major difference, of course, is the weather. Yesterday I was in San Francisco and walked to lunch with a guy who lives there. He wore a jacket because he said it was cold. It was not cold. It was downright balmy. Later, inside the office, another local asked if I thought it was too hot. I said, you kidding? I live in the Sacramento Valley. When it’s too hot for me, you San Franciscans will already be fully desiccated and put into bags with Just Add Water printed on them. Now I come to Oregon. Last night it was clear and Portland, as always, was heartbreakingly beautiful as seen from the freeway bridge, all her lights twinkling in the river. Today, in Hillsboro or Beaverton or wherever the hell I am, the sky is gray and the air cool and humid but it’s still lovely and I would happily take a long walk in it if I knew anyone here who likes to take long walks. I don’t. Aren’t any such people so far as I can tell, not in this confusing flat suburbia. Maybe they do on weekends.

Confusing, I said. My company has facilities spread all over the place out here and I am always getting lost. Up this road, down that, one side or the other of the airport … I cannot get this place straight. So I give up and head into the closest facility to ask where the one I want is but there’s never anyone there I can ask. All the guards have been cost-cut away and the automatic badge-reading turnstiles are not very informative. I found the place today more or less out of blind luck. Went down this brand new road and that brand new road, each of them lined with identical condominium complexes delimited by identical shopping centers, and after about six right turns, whoa, there it was. A big-ass building surrounded by cars. Not that such a thing is hard to find, but it had to be the right big-ass building, and it was and so now I need only remember the street names and I’m jake.

Inside, it’s all cubicles arrayed under a high ceiling crawling with pipes and cables. Used to be a manufacturing floor. Since all the factory jobs are now in China, the echoing space is filled with desks that hunker gray and cold under dim lights from high above. Almost as if they were outside, only without quite so much rain. It was in this low-key-worker-creating environment that I realized I’d skipped breakfast and was too distracted by the fact to be of any more use. Now that I’m fed, it’s back to the millstone for me. I can’t even begin to describe what I’m doing. Not because I would be giving away company secrets or because it’s just too technical to explain. No, I’m sure you can guess the reason.