I woke up at four o’clock this morning when Dominica got up for a minute. While she was up Oreo heard the smoke detector going off again – just the incessant beeping trying to tell us that the battery was low. I really hate this feature since the alarms are out of reach, all connected together and powered by A/C power anyway. They should be charged by the wall power and never need batteries replaced, IMHO. The biggest problem is that because they go off so piercingly loudly and echo so much you can never tell which one is the problem. And since they are all connected together one battery dying makes them all go off anyway. So you have no idea how to fix the problem.
The alarm, which didn’t go off all day until four in the morning, caused Oreo, of course, to panic. He was running around and jumping all over us. He was shaking and his heart was pounding. I got dressed as quickly as I could and took him for a walk. I talked to the front desk and one of the guys ran up with a ladder (which is why I can’t fix the issue myself) and spent a good twenty minutes getting all of the alarms to stop making noise. It was no small project. Just figuring out which ones were alerting (turns out that they all were) and moving from one to another trying to get them to stop is a major pain. Since you can never tell which one is bad or when you have fixed one or not. They even keep alerting after you have taking them off the wall and removed their batteries. It is like they are possessed.
Then I had to spent half an hour laying with Oreo to get him to calm down. He was so scared. We tried giving him cookies but he wouldn’t touch them.
I ended up having to work from home for a little bit this morning before going into the office because of Oreo’s little panic. I had to walk him again at six while Dominica was getting ready for work. After that he was finally ready to eat breakfast but not a cookie. Then he needed to stay with me in the office area and made me brush him for quite a while. Dominica said that after she got him to daycare that he had calmed down and was feeling much better but was visibly quite tired.
Since I was stuck working from home by that point for the morning and since so many long phone calls kept coming in I didn’t get a chance to head to the office until after eleven. I would have considered not going in but I am giving a “tour” of our Manhattan facilities to Antoni (an SGL reader) this afternoon so I kind of need to be there in person. I grabbed a quick slice at Triponi at Newark’s Penn Station as I didn’t get any real food today except for some cereal. That should hold me until dinner.
Today was an absolutely gorgeous day – I am really glad that I got to walk into the office. It was bright and calm and warm. No jackets needed today. Not at all. It was so pleasant.
I got to Wall Street and worked for about an hour before Antoni arrived there. I took him around my office there and showed him where we work and he got to meet my coworker there. Then we caught the company shuttle over to the Tribeca office where we spent the afternoon. I took my camera with me today to get some pics of the area around the Tribeca office but I totally forgot to take any pictures so that was a waste.
We got to spend quite a bit of time hanging out on one of the Tribeca trading floors. I have been there before but never get to go very often. It wasn’t all fun and games as I had to log in to someone’s computer anywhere that we went to do work which was unfortunate. I was working from my BlackBerry and borrowed PuTTY sessions all afternoon. Most of the afternoon was “meet and greet” kind of stuff. Nice change of pace and good for me to get out and meet some of my guys in person too or to see people that I have seen before but don’t see too often.
After work Antoni and I went out to Salaam Bombay just south of the office and had dinner. After diner we hit Starbucks and got some after dinner coffee and then walked on down to the WTC train station. I headed to Newark from there and Antoni used it to connect back to the Long Island Railroad to take him back out to the island where he is staying for the week. He had a long trip home.
It was rather late by the time that I got back to Newark. I transfered a couple of shows over to the AppleTV and we headed off to bed and watched the first episode of the fourth season, circa 1987, of Allo, Allo.
I am working from home tomorrow so will just be there with Oreo all day. He is looking forward to a day off after having missed so much sleep.