all freeways should have escalators.
June 26th, 2002The company I work for has many, many buildings, some labelled, some not, in the DFW area. One of the most prominent of these buildings is one I will be moving to at the end of August. This building used to be our headquarters and was built very carefully and artfully. It is made up of two large 5 story buildings joined in the center by an underground tunnel.
Each of these buildings is very similar in shape and design. At the heart of each of them is a rotunda filled with 2 and 3 story sculptures, escalators, security desks, and couches. All of this on a beautiful marble floor. The rotundas are surrounded by glass walls and doors, all leading into various portions of office space contained within the building. The floor has been embedded with ultraviolet light-sensitive materials that automated mail robots track and use to navigate the building delivering mail to its inhabitants. Millions and millions of dollars were spent building this building, and each of the materials used for almost every part of the building is something exotic from some exotic part of the world.
The tunnel is about 1/10th of a mile long and lined with sandstone imported from a remote part of the world. It features a quaint little cafe that overlooks a water fall that is outside of the tunnel, falling in front of the glass sides of portions of it that are not underground.
The entire building is rather lavish. There are various pieces of art, and furnishings scattered about wildly. The building is not difficult to navigate, however, one certainly must alter their course quite a bit to get from point A to point B.
On Friday night, a employee of that building found her way to a bar down the street and proceeded to have a good ol' time. Eventually she decided it was time to go home, and stumbled her way back to the West parking garage to her car. She headed out on the road.
After the exit to the West parking garage you have a choice to make. You can turn left, which will lead you to the road, and a few hundred yards down the road is the entrance to a freeway. Or you can turn right, which leads you to a circular parking area for visitors, and the main entrance to the West rotunda.
The subject of our story, with a few too many drinks in her, mistook this turn for the one that leads her onto the freeway, and therefore turned right, instead of left. She drove to the end of the parking area, up the curb and straight through the giant plate glass windows that line the front of the rotunda. As she jumped up the curb, she lost the oil pan on her white, early 90's Toyota Camry.
Somehow, the breaking of this huge plate glass window didn't phase her. She continued on course, through the main floor of the West rotunda, dodging various pieces of art and furniture, and found her way to the entrance of the tunnel leaking oil the entire way. By following the oil one can tell exactly how difficult the navigation was to get through the rotunda.
She entered into the tunnel and drove down the ultraviolet sensitive carpets. Her tire tracks in the carpet show that she weaved back and forth and yet never actually hit any of the walls or the art pieces. She drove past the cafe, and past the waterfall, and continued on until she came out on the freshly polished marble floor of the East rotunda.
Again, she navigated herself across the rotunda, and down one of the side hallways which led past some escalator banks and out to the East parking garage. On her way out, her car got a little too close to some greenery and she found herself unable to move any further.
Security and the Police showed up minutes later to find a very confused woman wondering why her car wasn't moving, where all the street lights went, and why there were escalators on the freeway.
Security must have leaked the photos to someone, and they made their way up the chain of command where there were then filtered back down to me.
If you go there now, you can still see her tread marks on the carpet in the tunnel, as the cleaning staff has yet to figure out how to get all the oil out.


















