The Walking Path (from 2006)

Going through old drafts for posts I found this one. This was at Union Central, a life insurance company in northern Cincinnati where I worked on a project in 2006: 

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Here in the basement my midwestern insurer, I noticed a sign overhead in the tiled hallway leading to the men's room across the hall from the other men's room, which was closed for housekeeping. The sign said "walking path," and pointed down another tiled hallway. Intrepidly, I set out along it. At the end of the tiled hallway, the path entered onto a long carpeted hallway with fetching fluorescent lights. I took this too.

It was lined with boxes of old documents, and occasionally gave way to views of large rooms filled with paper files.

At the end of that hallway, it turned down a short hallway, and then doubled back along the length of the building again, another long box-lined hallway. Towards the end, and old forelorn mainframe cabinet.

Mysteriously, when the hallway ended, there was no sign for the path. Could I have lost the thread? There was a door to the garage, which was actually a loading dock with a few fancy cars (Jags and Caddies), which curiously supplemented my comment the other day that there were no fancy cars in the parking lot, only workaday vehicles. The executives had hidden the fine rides in the bowels of the building.

My walk ended, I found it hard to concentrate on work, dazzled as I was by the glamour of it all.