I Work Here

When I returned to Bandito, I showed up to the office on a Monday morning, about 10am.  I parked in back, and walked past a girl dumping a wastebasket in the dumpster.  I went inside and headed back to my office.  The place looked familiar, but I didn’t recognize the two or three people I saw, busy on their laptops.  I looking into to my office, which was unoccupied, and my equipment was still there.  I checked the other hallway, and saw another unfamiliar face before being intercepted by the girl from outside.  “Um, excuse me.  Can I help you with something?”  “Yeah, I am Mike McCarthy.  I work here.”  Her response was priceless, and I still tease her about it: “Oh!  I thought you’d be so much older!”  That was followed by a wide-eyed expression and hand over her open mouth as she caught herself.  After an awkward moment I responded with “well, this is me,” and she introduced herself as Hana, our new receptionist.

I headed back to my office, and shortly thereafter the interns who had been covering my position that summer finally arrived and we began to catch up on what I had missed.  They had hired a few people while I was gone, gotten rid of a couple more, and everyone I knew was just late coming in after a long weekend.  We had a couple day overlap while I was brought up to speed on our current projects, before they headed back to school for the next year.

The cast didn’t end up being too big of an issue at work, since I am quite good at typing with one hand.  I got it off six weeks later, and did a few months of physical therapy, but was able to get full movement back in my hand, which was not a foregone conclusion when they had shortened the tendon a bit to overlap the join.

My roommate Shaun knew my boss, having previously lived with him, so that spring he had also began doing odd jobs around the office and when we went on location, to supplement his lack of income as a "writer."  Around the time I got back from camp that year, he was hired on at Bandito as well, initially to help with our move to a new facility.

The big news at the time was that we were finally moving to a much larger facility, down in Culver City.  We had gotten a long term lease on a building that was under construction, but we had to move out of our current location immediately, because it was going to be torn down.  That is how bad our first office building was.  So in the meantime, we were going to move into a warehouse nearby, as a temporary location for “about six months.”  We would have to setup everything in there, and work there while our permanent building was constructed fifty yards away.

I started going down frequently to plan and design our new location.  It was a huge open warehouse, with a large raised platform in one corner.  We built walls around the base of that to make solid edit rooms for acoustic reasons.  The rest of the offices were setup in army tents on the open floor.  The area on top of the platform was for my desk and my boss’s, the server racks, and all of the other post support functions.  It was about a thousand square feet up there, so we had far more space than our entire previous location.   We eventually had three other workstation areas setup up there, for our interns and assistant editors.