On Friday, January 6, I left Sears Tower for the last time as an employee.
It was certainly interesting working in the building, especially since I started there two weeks before September 11. One point is that I never felt unsafe there. September 11 gave me an entire new perspective on what’s important and the concept of a “number being up,” and my priorities and the things I worry about changed after that.
The building was also an interesting study in self-containment. It has restaurants, a US post office, a really cool bookstore, a card shop, a couple banks and many ATMs, and of course, a Starbucks. Sometimes in the winter I would get into the office at 7:30 am and not leave the building all day, yet I was able to go “out” for lunch and completely get away from the office by heading downstairs.
The fact that the Tower was home to many companies made it interesting, too: at a lot of workplaces you see Steve from Accounting or Dave from Applications Development when you’re in the cafeteria; at the Sears Tower, the person next to you in line at the Corner Bakery or riding the elevator could have worked for E&Y, Eurex, or any one of a dozen law firms.
In the summertime, it was fascinating to see the faces and hear the accents of all the people who came to visit. At one point I thought of learning how to say “The entrance to the Skydeck is on the Jackson Boulevard side” in German, Japanese, French, Russian, and any of a dozen other languages because visitors tend to mill around the employees’ and retail shops’ entrances. I’ve also taken more than my share of photos of tourists (with their cameras) in front of the big granite sign on Wacker Drive, which was usually followed by providing directions to a nearby landmark (often accompanied by lots of hand gestures). The last time I was asked for directions, a gentleman from London asked me how to to get to the “Golden Mile” from the Tower. Not only did he get directions back to Michigan Avenue, but I gave him a restaurant recommendation for him and his family as well.
One of the things a coworker used to say about the Sears Tower was that, no matter where you were, as long as you were within 25 miles and it was a clear day, you always saw your office, which could be a good or bad thing.
As I write this, I am sitting in the “Connections Court” at Woodfield Mall, riding their free WiFi connection. This isn’t quite the example of self-containment that is the Sears Tower, mainly because Woodfield is completely focused on retail commerce. If there were professional offices here (as there used to be in the Randhurst Mall, where I spent much of my youth), it would be a fair comparison. (So I guess this paragraph really serves no purpose other than to let everyone know there’s free WiFi to be had in the Northwest suburbs 🙂
So farewell to a place I called, well, not quite ‘home,’ but certainly a place I spent many, many hours. A new phase begins next week.