The Vault

Today was another day filled with new things and learning at work. For the sake of brevity I am only going to share 2 of them here though. When I went in today I was assigned the National City Tower as a project. It has 2o floors, 19 of which are currently occupied and needed to be prepared for the upcoming fire inspection. Basically I had to go through and check to make sure all the emergency egress lights were working and that the exit signs had working bulbs in them. It's pretty easy work, just tedious and time consuming. The first thing I had to do was go get my security pass so I could open the interior doors of the building. As it turns out one company runs security for most if not all of Cincinnati. You asking what does this mean for me...It means for me almost unlimited access to everything downtown. I can go to almost any floor of almost any building. So I took a break today on the 48 floor of the Carew Tower, not the top floor, but from the inside you don't know that, and its really high. I understand now why people would want that office because the view is amazing.

My second story is one of fear. I was going through the National City Tower, which has a lot of empty desks currently, checking the lights as I said. Well I started at floor 20 and started working my way down. By about 11:30 I was in the basement. Now all through the building I had been using this big line of 6 elevators as my frame of reference for what part of the floor I was in. I knew the elevators ran North South and that the freight elevator I was using was at the southern end. So I noticed when I got off on the bottom floor that none of the other elevators were there. I didn't think much of it, being in the basement I figured that not many people needed to go down there anyways. The only thing that didn't make sense was that this was the nicest floor I had walked on yet. The walls and floor were marble, there was nice artwork on the walls of marble, and there were different kinds of statues and sculptures scattered around. It was starting to dawn on me that something was amiss because there didn't seem to be any offices. When I walked out into the room the ceiling went up about 20 feet. I was just taking it all in sort of looking for the lights I was supposed to be working on when I turned around and saw it. A shinny obviously metal wall with a big door cut into it. The door was swung open and looked enormous on its solid piano hinge. The door I am referring to is of course the 14ish inch think vault door to the National City Main Branch vault. I mean granted the only thing in it at this point are some IOUs, but it was still pretty nuts. I was scared. I just short of ran back to the elevator and bolted. Thinking back on it I had nothing really to be scared of I think. I mean I have clearance right?