You know that feeling when you board a plane and you have to walk through first class, past those plush roomy seats, all the way back, back, back to economy? That's pretty much what my walk to work is like. The magazine I've joined has its office in a 5-star hotel called Le Meridien. The hotel is filled with every kind of luxury you can imagine, including a television by the elevators playing cartoons so that the guests don't get bored while waiting.
I walk past all of this opulence to a cramped little office on the second floor, jammed between a row of kitschy jewelry and clothing shops.
On my first day of work I showed up at 10 a.m. only to find the place completely deserted...
Turns out everyone worked really late the night before (on deadline for the March Issue) so people only began trickling in by 11 a.m. After that, the place buzzed with energy and by my second day I was assigned my first article: a profile of a liquor baron attending a conference at a hotel nearby. I expected the interview to be really boring and the perfectly coiffed PR lady who was sitting beside him in the hotel coffee shop, didn't give me much hope...what she gave me was 10 minutes. I blanked on all of my carefully thought-out questions and instead asked the first thing that popped into my mind. "When was the first time you got drunk?" To my astonishment the liquor baron chuckled, looked down at his wine glass (white wine), and wistfully replied, "It was in the back of a Fiat car. I was 16. We were swigging from this cheap brand of scotch, my friends and this girl I liked...The night ended with me trying to kiss her and getting slapped!" Go figure. Here I was expecting some bland answer and instead this gentleman hit me with total human honesty. People are constantly a surprise.
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