The Words - An Autobiography

Wiz-kids in the Basement

Whenever I returned from my Hat sales trips, it seemed there'd been some other dramatic change, even if I had only been away a few days. My wife had combined the suites of our entire wing of the second floor into quite a sizeable single apartment. Since then, the business had overrun the rest of the house. No more naked-hide-and-seek beyond the walls of our enlarged private living space. There were brainstorming sessions in the library, so most days, we couldn't even chase one another around the balcony and forget oral sex clinging to a library ladder.

Small formal meetings generally gathered around the dining room table. But we'd grown enough that all-hands meetings could only be accommodated in the basement– or the attic, as someone joked, which was taken as a serious suggestion and not a bad one. What had been the parlor become a social gathering space, where I increasingly found young people, who I didn't know, discussing anything, from the physics of low power electromagnetic fields to the metaphysics of virtual reality.

The pool room remained, thus far, a largely unused recreation area since most of our young employees preferred the recreational opportunities provided by their phones rather than any requiring physical activity, even as minimal as playing pool. However, the withdrawing room and the fainting couches did attract an eclectic group of nappers.

What had been an informal dining area off the backside of the butler's pantry, which we'd somehow missed on our initial tour, was repurposed to serve as a lunchroom. Although, most meals and snacks were eaten below at desks, in cubes. The commercial kitchen had been scaled down and modernized. The equipment was sold to a start-up restaurant, which would be happy to deliver. A good portion of the kitchen's original footprint was repurposed, including the walk-in freezer and the pantry.

The waiting room off the Grand Foyer became our reception and waiting room. We planned for the three unoccupied suites along the eastern side of the second floor, one of which Bob had declined for reasons that no longer applied, to become our corporate offices.

The third floor had 'unofficially' become a dormitory. We discovered that some of our new young hires never went home or had even sought other living arrangements when they came to work for us. Instead, they'd wandered up the stairs to one of the empty beds on the third floor when they needed to crash. The house became their official residence for a few, sharing one of the third-floor bedrooms, newly furnished with twin beds. Several of the third-floor bedrooms had bunk beds, also new, where 'non-residents,' who did have other living arrangements but simply never when home, continued to crash.

The attic, I discovered, had been cleaned out and partitioned into small sleeping rooms, surrounding a common area in the middle. An elevator had been added at the back of the house from the basement to the third floor. Anyone going to the attic still needed to use the stairs. And the bathrooms on the third floor. No one had an issue with a single flight of stairs, but climbing from the basement to the attic had been too much to ask of young people not inclined toward fitness.

The bathrooms in the basement, which I wasn't sure I remembered, were expanded into locker rooms, with toilet stalls, private changing booths, and what had, according to the original plans, been a large open shower area in each. I'd followed a bald head into what I assumed to be the men's locker room, looking for a urinal, only to find none. I hurried out, thinking I'd made an error in assuming that I'd followed a young man. I walked to the other locker room across the basement but found no urinals. And I discovered there were also no signs specifying whether either of the facilities was for a particular gender. So, I still had no idea whether I'd followed a young man or woman into the first locker room. I tracked down Bob for an explanation.

He explained that when there were only two single-stalled bathrooms, the young women began using the men's restroom when they found the women's occupied. And some of the young men decided fair was fair and removed the signs. When Bob brought in contractors to build the locker rooms to accommodate our growing number of employees of both sexes, he'd assumed they'd want to go back to separate facilities, especially since the original plans included both having common shower areas. Following that plan, he'd ordered urinals for one and shower stalls for the other, assuming that the women would want more privacy than the men. But, since the locker rooms were in opposite corners of the basement, quite a distance from one another, most continued using whichever was closest.