So I’ve been working from home the last two days due to a massive steam pipe explosion that occurred just two blocks from my office in the Flatiron district downtown in Manhattan. Generally, these explosions have happened throughout the city due to ridiculously old infrastructure that the city is too cheap or careless to deal with, and every now and then, there have been fatalities and injuries. The city seems happier to deal with these fatalities and injuries in payouts than they are to prevent them in the first place. If you think about it, it’s actually the way our healthcare system is: it’s happier to deal with you being sick (and taking you for everything you are worth because healthcare here is the most expensive in the world) than it is to prevent you from getting sick in the first place. Luckily this time, no one was killed, though a few people did suffer some minor injuries.

Based on discussions with our office manager, who has been in contact with our building’s super, who of course has been in contact with city officials, we’ve learned that it’s very much in the air as to when we will actually be able to regain access to the building. The city blocked off entry into the general area due to potential asbestos contamination. I was sulky because I actually do not enjoy working from home and prefer to be in the office. I like the camaraderie at work, the free air conditioning, and my free lunch. I also miss my work computer, which I stupidly left in the office on Wednesday night.

But the scariest part when I think about it is how old the infrastructure is in this entire city, and how many old buildings that are not up to code are being inhabited all over this island, all over these five boroughs. An incident like this one could happen pretty much anywhere, and we all know this will not be the last. Chris always says that the biggest irony of our being required to have renter’s insurance in our building (which is only two years old now) is that we’re far safer and less likely to have a disaster happen here than in our old Upper East Side co-op apartment, which is far, far older, creakier, and who knows when it was ever last inspected for safety? And we never had renter’s insurance at the last place.

We just have to hope for the best.

Today, a semi-new colleague who works remotely from South Carolina was in the office, so I suggested that we take a walk and catch up. Based on the few chats I’ve had with him and observing him when he’s been in the office, I can tell that he’s not quite at ease with his job responsibilities or his place in the company yet. He’s still adjusting to new processes and of course, learning our technology, which certainly can be a challenge. He’s also still trying to find his social niche here, particularly given that he’s a remote employee and doesn’t have a lot of face time with any of us. We spent most of our half hour talking about non-work related things, which I purposely constructed. So I told him about observations and experiences I had during my recent India trip, and he talked about the adjustment of his college- and post-college age children moving out, adjusting to adult and work life, and living a bi-state life (they go between New Jersey, where they’re originally from and have relatives, and South Carolina, which is their primary residence). “It’s nice to have a conversation not about work at work!” he exclaimed to me, smiling. It was clear he doesn’t really talk about non-work related topics with other people here.

It’s almost been like an unspoken role of mine, to make people feel comfortable here and at ease. I don’t even know how that’s really happened. I don’t know if it’s just part of my aura, or the questions that I ask or the efforts I make to talk to people, but it’s just kind of become part of my de factor non-job responsibility here. “You make people feel comfortable with your presence,” a colleague in this office recently said to me. “You keep things calm and organized.”

The more I think about it, though, the more it seems like additional pressure on me. It also seems like a bit of a gender role if I want to start digging deeper into this because what man has ever been told that he has a calming presence that puts people at ease?

When you live in the concrete jungle that is New York City, or just live in this area where a small amount of space costs loads of money, you start realizing how luxurious it must be to have space for things like gardens, vast open spaces for outdoor chairs, tables, and grills, fruit trees, and vegetable shrubs. A remote colleague who works out of his home office in Atlanta had a work meeting a couple weeks ago in Miami, and he’d told me that he and his daughters had spent a few hours that weekend picking peaches that were ripe and nearly falling off his peach tree in his garden. In total, they collected nearly 200 peaches; they had so much that they just couldn’t eat them all in time, so they went door to door handing them out to their neighbors. I jokingly suggested to my colleague that he share some peaches with another colleague coming down to Miami to join him for his meeting. My colleague actually took me seriously and gave my New York colleague a few peaches (and some plums from his other tree!). He presented a few to our New York colleague, who ate the fruit.

This New York colleague proceeded to text our mutual colleague here to complain about our Atlanta colleague’s generosity. “Why would he give me fruit? I’m traveling back to New York, and he wants me to cart fruit back?” he grumbled to our mutual colleague. When our mutual colleague told me this, I was livid. What is wrong with this guy? How can he not appreciate homegrown fruit; who in this area ever gets gifted anything that is homegrown or homemade? You’re lucky to ever get anything gifted to you for any reason!

There are fewer things worse to me than an inability to be grateful for what you have and are given, especially when someone has been so kind and generous to give you something for absolutely no reason at all other than for the sake of giving and sharing. It never fails to shock me how ungrateful and miserable people choose to be in their overly privileged lives that they take small acts of kindness like this for granted. He even ate the fruit, too, and said they were really good!! 

Yesterday morning, I woke up at around 4:30am, likely again from the little bits of jetlag that I’ve faced this week. It’s not something to complain about of course… until about an hour and a half later, I woke up again from a half-sleep, this time to a sharp, stinging, biting pain in my right calf that would not stop, and I started grabbing my calf and trying to depress my fingers on the spot where the stabbing feeling seems to be radiating from. It lasted for a good minute before I could stop holding my calf. I was pretty much screaming or moaning the entire time, and it certainly felt like longer than a minute. It felt like at least two or three times as long as that.

This type of pain seems have happened every now and then for me in the last couple of years, and it always happens when I know I am not getting enough potassium. This never used to happen to me before. “It’s a sign you’re aging!” my colleague, who is in her 50s, told me, laughing. “Welcome to aging, you youngin’!”

That… is not comforting. I actually am very comfortable being in my early 30s. I am probably the most confident about myself than I have ever been in my life. But sudden muscle spasms… no. These are not welcome at all.

In the world of tech startups, I’m basically surrounded by highly privileged people every single day. At my company, which like most companies is mostly a bunch of white people, every single day I interact with people who have no idea what it’s like to have a real life dilemma: to struggle to have food on the table, a roof over their head, legitimate and legal status in a country, the difference between life and death of a struggling loved one. So if I am surrounding myself every day with people who generally have the means to live a comfortable life, then why do I feel like every time I take an international trip that I am the one who is privileged versus them, and they make it seem like they could not do the exact same trip?

I don’t believe it’s because of lack of ability or lack of means or lack of money. It’s really about lack of desire or curiosity. I have shopaholic colleagues who spend endlessly on clothing, shoes, and accessories, and others who spend way too much on rent when compared to what they probably earn. I have another colleague who has an inordinate amount of extremely expensive and collectible Nikes. And then there’s my colleague who loves flashy cars. We put time, effort, and money into the things we care about. They don’t really care about travel or learning about the world. But I do.

A lack of curiosity about the world is so unattractive to me. If you live a comfortable life and do not struggle to make ends meet, it’s hard for me to fathom why you would lack curiosity in understanding other peoples, other cultures, other places in the world and how they operate. The world we live in is so vast. It’s far more than just the tri-state area.