So, I went to New York City yesterday to have dinner with some clients. The dinner was great — we ate at Michael Jordan’s restaurant, which is on the upper concourse of Grand Central Terminal. Really cool setting. But that was the only cool part of the evening.
It was Africa hot yesterday. I took Amtrak to NYC, which wasn’t bad — the air conditioning was working okay on the train. But there’s no A/C in the subway. I waited to go uptown on the 1, but after waiting in the pit of hell for 15 minutes, not a single train came on my track. And when one finally did, it was packed to the gills with sweaty and cranky New Yorkers. (Oh yeah, I went at rush hour. Brilliant.) The next train that came along was blissfully open, and I even got a seat. I was soaking up the A/C while I looked at the Budweiser ads in Spanish.
I had to change to the 7 to go crosstown to Grand Central Terminal. Fortunately, that train was right there and I was in air conditioned goodness. But when that train arrived at Grand Central…now that was heat.
Those of you who have taken the 7 know that it’s deeper than a coal mine. You have to go up all kinds of stairs and escalators to get anywhere approaching Planet Earth. And with each passing step I was getting hotter and hotter, but not in the Brad Pitt way, more like the armpit way. I was steaming. Then I had to meet my clients and look cool. I mopped myself off as best I could with some napkins I’d scrounged from Starbucks for just such an occasion. It barely worked. My core temperature was approaching nuclear fusion.
Well, dinner was great. I had the seafood appetizer and the signature porterhouse. I had to be rolled out of there on forklift, but the meal was excellent. I changed seats four times on the late train back to Philadelphia. It was the train rider’s equivalent of turning over the cool side of the pillow. And I said a little prayer for Willis Haviland Carrier, the father of air conditioning. What a brilliant, brilliant man he was.
