I’m siting at our new counter at the HUB on our new seats waiting for a crane. The counter is not screwed in yet, neither is the seat, but it’s so close I can start to pretend we’re open.

That big red box in the picture, sorry, BOXES, you might look at those and wonder what they are. Well, they’re fire protection boxes, but more important is where they are. They are right at the entrance to the HUB. That’s right, crazy huh? Right at the entrance.

I’m learning a lot from this job. That’s because we’ve screwed up on a lot of things. This red box has to be the worst. I had no idea it was going to go there. But by the time it was installed it was nearly impossible to move. And it’s one of those painful mistakes that doesn’t have a single owner. The engineer did a bad job with the design (he spec’d the location of that box ON THE FRONT WINDOW!) The architects didn’t catch this detail in the plan, and probably had no idea how large and hideous that box was going to be. I had no idea that FTAA with a box around it, the way it was written on the fire protection plan, meant “GIANT UGLY RED BOX.” And my contractors were doing their best to follow the plans, thinking they’d solved a problem when they moved the box off the window onto the wall.

And there it is, a big red box that breaks the tranquility of the restaurant. Feels to me like I was sitting at a lake, enjoying myself, and somebody parked beside me with a noisy smelly truck. Not that I don’t like noisy smelly trucks, I hope to have one someday. But I don’t want that firebox at the entrance to my store. Oh well.