The Fountain & the Plaza

When you have a first floor window on the world, you see things that you never expected to see. I’m not talking about dead pigeons, elderly people breaking their hips, creative nose-picking and the waddle-walk of the morbidly obese. No. Those are the expected things. People do strange things when they think no one is watching. And they do these things in front of my office window or around the fountain across the plaza (about 20 yards from my window).

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that my window has been mistaken for a public mirror. I’ve raised my eyebrows as people seemingly stared right at me while combing their hair, putting on lipstick, and doing other activities of varying hygienic value. The best/worst example of a window-mistaken-for-mirror incident: the lady who, upon seeing her reflection in the office window, decided that some part of her upper torso needed adjusting. My co-worker reported that it left my boss speechless for two-minutes (a new record) and caused him to turn several shades of red.

But the highlights this summer have all been about the fountain. It started when I looked out my window to see two bizarrely dressed people, a man and a woman, standing on the edge of the fountain in odd poses. Then I noticed the photographer. The two were clearly doing a fashion shoot, because no one on this side of the Atlantic tries so hard to look that indifferent while wearing clothes like that.

A few days later the “fashion fountain” became the washing machine. One of homeless regulars furtively glanced around the plaza before dropping his entire backpack into the fountain, swishing it back and forth and taking it for a few laps. I wasn’t sure that I had just seen what I thought I had just seen until later on in the day when the groundskeeper pulled out a pool cleaning pole and retrieved a few items that had fallen out of the backpack. (I don’t know what the groundskeeper did with them, but I almost want to believe he kept them; I spent the first six to nine months on the job thinking that the groundskeeper was one of the “regulars.”)



But the incident that took the cake happened a few days ago. I got a call from the second floor asking me to check out the people outside my window. I was stunned to see a frumpy, egg-shaped couple, mid-sixty-ish, in bathing suits, “swimming” in the fountain. After rubbing my eyes a few times, I remembered that my cell phone has a camera, but by then, the couple had exited the pool and were slowly walking across the plaza, hand in hand, as if this were the most normal thing in the world.

Though perhaps I should be less harsh in my judgments; a co-worker sent me this picture while I was out of the office with the caption of “former Bank employee.” At least he still has a mirror and a washing machine.