I’ve never lived in a place without working plumbing. Isn’t that supposed to be part of the guaranteed glory of living in America, that your home should have working plumbing? This is partly why I was slightly taken aback when I was reading Jeannette Walls’s memoir Glass Castle to find out that pretty much her entire childhood, she lived in homes without toilets across this country. She and her siblings lived in rural areas where they’d literally just drop their pants and pee in grass, or dig holes in fields and take a dump.

I thought about this when I came to our new office location today. It’s our first day in the new office space. The office space is beautiful and modern, and it’s clear that a lot of work was put into renovating the space and building it exactly as our company wanted it: lots of natural light in every section of the floor, huge windows, high ceilings, a beautiful and brand new open kitchen space complete with three refrigerators, a double sink, and a massive kitchen island. The conference rooms all have glass doors and walls, and every room is hooked up with the latest and greatest for video and phone conferencing. Our desks are all adjustable via a button for sitting, standing, or half-sitting on stools. The one thing that was lacking? Working toilets. The toilets would not flush. And the plumbers were delayed in getting to us.

What were the alternatives? 1) Take the freight elevator to the basement where a haunted-house-like bathroom exists. 2) Walk two blocks north along Fifth Avenue to the old office space, where our badges can still scan us in and we can still use those bathrooms. Yay!

This is definitely a New York City thing when everything seems perfect during a move except one, big glaring issue. Classic New York.