City Views, Country Dreams

Good morning from New York.

It is a beautiful morning, quite unlike yesterday when part of our city (Brooklyn) actually had a tornado pass through. The rest of the city and area settled for an intense thunderstorm and many inches rain in a very short period.

I had planned to get to the shop early to meet the new cleaners, well before our official open-up time. That plan went to smithereens, as I discovered that our public transportation system had lost its struggle to keep up with the weather. Flooded tracks, signal problems. Many subways not running at all by 8 a.m. Not enough buses pulled into service to take up some of the slack.

So, we New Yorkers either decided to stay at home (not an option for me) or to walk to our destination. In heat and humidity that were other storm souvenirs. Two and one half miles for me. I was a bit limp on arrival at the shop. The cleaners also had not been able to arrive.

I drank a lot of water. Then realized that something looked a bit different in the office part of the shop. Wet spots spread across the ceiling tiles. Plastic covers over the fluorescent light fixtures were full of water. Oh boy. There was more. One of these plastic covers had not been able to take the pressure of the water, and had fallen to the stairwell below it. Releasing lots of water.

The stockroom in the shop basement was flooded. Not deeply flooded, no damage to any of our goods, but still. Oh boy.

About this time my stock associate arrived with his own transportation story and then we got into action. Made phone calls, more phone calls, showed everything to the superintendant of the building so that he could contact the landlord. More phone calls to our corporate offices, the cleaning company, all sorts of folks.

Time to open the shop.

As the day wore on, everything began to get sorted out. Half of my staff were unable to come to work. Very few customers came in. We kept seeing lots of people walking purposefully back and forth on the Fifth Avenue sidewalk outside our front window. They were either just reaching their destination, or leaving that destination to try to return home.

Having gotten official permission to close a bit early, I prepared a little "early closing" sign for our window, and we began to prep the sales floor for the evening. Then...of course, customers began to come in. So, we did not close early, but actually had some good business during that last hour.

Then we closed the shop, locked the door and went home. I treated myself to a long, but uncrowded, bus ride back uptown.

So many people were greatly inconvenienced by the transportation problems. My day was relatively mild. But it was so good to finally have a shower!

And I did have pleasant dreams.