third floor tour
A fun thing, for me anyway, happened on my way out of the building at the end of my work day yesterday. I have stopped biking for the year, as the mornings have just gotten too cold, and so I was walking home. This meant getting off the elevator on the third floor so I could go across the skybridge to the parking garage to the building on Western Avenue across the street, then walk north on that street to downtown before turning up Pine. And when I got off the elevator, the office space whose entry doors are right there toward the west side of the building, were both propped wide open.
The space is completely emptied. I actually already noticed this once last month, and I took a photo through the closed door windows showing part of the empty space and the Puget Sound view beyond.
I wish I could figure out what company used to be in there. Maybe I will. But, as of today I haven't.
In any case, with the doors wide open yesterday, and not a soul in sight, I wandered in, and found the space to be quite larger than I expected—it's maybe 70% of the second floor plate, minus basically the northeast quadrant which is leased to someone else. This building is built with the decks on the south end as stepped setbacks, so each floor up is just the amount smaller than the floor below, equivalent to the size of the deck. Third floor being two floors down from ours, that means the floor plate is a fair bit longer. But, this particular space not using the entire floor plate, their rentable space is at 23,641 square feet, counting 2,817 of deck space. Lori, our Store Operations Manager, tells me PCC's space, which is the entirety of the fifth floor, is right at 26,000 square feet counting the deck space, so I guess 10% more than the rentable square footage in the open space on the third floor.
In any case, I spent a good fifteen minutes snooping around in there, which was great fun. Someday someone else will move in there and it will be cool to have my shots of what it looked like empty. I took several photos, and even one video of walking from the north end to the south end, before going through the exit that opens right up to the aforementioned third-floor skybridge.
I might have been out of there in ten, except for the couple of minutes I spent on the video walking through the length of the space, and also the time it took me to get that timed selfie in the northwest corner office. I propped my phone on the door handle and it kept falling, so it took me about six tries and maybe half of them wound up being timed shots of the floor.
Lori told me the real estate company that owns the building "may be open to making it a residential space. It could be your next home!" Talk about a dream commute! I'll find it very odd if the third floor gets converted into residential space, though. On the other hand, maybe that's where we're headed with all this unused office space around, as people continue taking full advantage of the opportunity to work from home. Scott even joked before Lori emailed me that, "Matthew's next flat 😊 Room to stretch out lol"
Of course, I'd have to get a much higher paying job, and thus have far more ambition than I've ever been willing to entertain, in order to afford such a thing. Or maybe win the lottery? Which I never play? Shobhit continues to play the lottery just to keep hope alive, even though he might as well just be burning money. It never sways him, for some reason, to know he has better odds of getting struck by lightning.
I stopped briefly at floor three on my way up the elevators this morning, just to check, and the doors to the space had been closed. I wonder if they'll be open again at the end of the day today? I have no idea if they were left open by mistake or if it was a deliberate move to generate interest. I suspect the latter, but who knows. I only ever saw one person the whole time I was in there, and it was just someone waiting for the elevator, looking the other way so he never saw me.
So, what else? Well, I did also get my hair cut yesterday! I walked straight to Rudy's after finally leaving my building, deciding to return there for the first time since October 2017, so far as I can tell from my budget sheet—in the intervening time I returned to Bang, which is like twice as expensive, because in 2018 I got a haircut I really loved. But, they have never quite replicated it, not even when I was finally able to book with the same hairdresser who had done that 2018 cut. Finally I decided, if it's a crapshoot no matter what, I might as well go back to it being a crapshoot for half the price.
I walked in at around 5:20 or so to see if they had availability for walk-in, at the Rudy's on Pine Street. They did not have availability until 6:30, so I took that slot, walked home, had a sandwich for lunch, then walked back to Rudy's again.
I'm a lot happier with this haircut than I was with the last one I had there, which left one side of my hair noticeably longer than the other side, further in the back, and I had to go back and get it corrected. I had a new person this time, a pretty cool woman named Pam, and I found no fault with the cut she gave me. My hair was long enough when I went in that I expected to have the "long haircut" charge, which is higher, but she told me it took her about the same amount of time as a small haircut and so she charged me the lower price of $37—with tax and 20% tip it came to about $44.
When I got home again, Ivan had a fresh haircut as well. And guess where? At Rudy's! His was already very short though so I'm sure his had gone much faster. He was charged the same amount I was.
Oh, I did also learn something new today: that Pine location is apparently the first they ever had, and the office space in the floor above them in that building is their corporate headquarters. Apparently it has been for as long as they've had a headquarters for multiple shops, and I never knew it.
Anyway, my hair now is shorter than it's been since I got my cut two month earlier than usual for the Australia trip in February of last year—and then what I thought would be an October 2020 haircut had to be skipped due to the pandemic, leaving me to grow my hair out for a good 14 months, until it was longer than it had been in 15 years. And then, when I got my last haircut at Bang last April, the woman actually left it longer than I really wanted, which I wasn't sure was the case until I was home and had taken a shower and done my hair my own way the next morning. I just decided to let it go again for the next six months, but it did leave my hair longer than I would have preferred by this month. I explained all of this to Pam, and she totally got it, and really gave me the haircut I really wanted. I'll grow it out again for the next six months as usual, but at least this time it won't be as long again by April 2022.
I opted not to color it, either. In the right light it still looks blond anyway, so, whatever. It's really quite gray. Pam said she really liked the color, and I have gotten a lot of compliments on it in recent years when I let it go back to the natural gray color.
Anyway, I walked back home, watched this week's episode of Y: The Last Man in the bedroom, and then watched this week's episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver with Shobhit in the living room, followed by two episodes of Schitt's Creek on Netflix, closing out season five. We now have one season left to watch, after which I am really going to miss it.
[posted 12:30 pm]