Monday, December 21, 2009

post 688. trouble at macy's.

my associate emily and i, trying to get shopping done for our respective significant others / family, went into macy's yesterday (my first appearance into macy's long storyline) so i could see the champion of the department store olympics. decorations, a throng of holiday merry-shoppers, wooden escalators. and if you think there are too many starbucks in manahatta, then you can take respite: macy's has only one starbucks per floor.

of course, this is also the day that macy's has a fire. we see the smoke on the third floor, but it seems pretty mild, as far as conflagrations go. i mean, a little smoke. anyone who knows the people who live above me can tell you that my cooking produces more smoke than the silliness at macy's yesterday, and it certainly didn't look to be as bad as the news made it out to be this morning, what with the video of the heroic fire fighter escorting the coughing (U.E.S.-looking) matron out the front doors.

we move on, wandering through the store upwards to the ninth floor. kids stand in line on the fourth floor to see santa, and they're in a haze. someone says that the problem started in the shoe department. then, another few floors up, the story has developed into someone having tried to burn a security tag off some expensive clothing item. of course, the fact that there are countless employees and technicians standing and pointing at one of the regular metal escalators on the third floor, all on various walkie-talkies and phones makes the culprit seem pretty obvious: terrorist gremlins.


so by the time we make it to the top - gorgeous hard-wood floors - the alarms go off: the fdny wants everyone out of the building. and who does all the running? macy's employees. our thinking (in ambling towards the top of the building with the fire in it) is that if the fire was really, truly bad, they would have evacuated us a lot sooner, right? and a lot more people would have been running. and everything would look like some metal video from 1985. of course, i'm sure the train of thought we were on was the same train of thought people on the titanic were on. you know, "oh, that was just turbulence. i'm sure there's nothing to worry about."


we join a groggling mass of people making our way down the back stairs, and pour out into the streets of manhattan. all's well. and countless shoppers make their way to the next destination, simply crowding another store, telling of the time they were at macy's and a fire broke out, and two morons who thought they were above it all went deeper and deeper into it.



post 687. the snows come to new york city.


Saturday, December 19, 2009

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Monday, December 07, 2009