In our home in California, I built a room for my library. In our previous apartment, we used the third bedroom as the library. Now, two of our three nice bookcases and my writing table are in our bedroom. Needless to say, it is cozy.
A few years ago, my wife bought me a leather desk chair from Costco for Christmas. It is nice. I have been using it ever since. However, it has now become a problem.
I can’t slide the chair under the writing table because the arms are too high. Hence, it is eating up an additional two feet of precious space.
At work, I sit on a Steelcase Criterion chair. Everything on it adjusts, including the arm height. The chair is very comfortable!
In fact, many years ago, when Sprint was building it’s campus in Overland Park, they asked the top 16 chair manufacturers to give them their best samples to test. Over 97% of the employees chose the Criterion as their favorite. When they moved in, Sprint placed the largest order that Steelcase has ever received: 15,000 Criterion chairs @ $500+ each.
I thought, perhaps I could get one for our bedroom. I could drop the arms down, push the chair under my writing table and reclaim some valuable floor space in our bedroom.
I called the man who sold the chairs to my company to see if he had any more. He had a few left. We agreed to meet this morning at 10:00 A.M.
His instructions to me were to drive through the main intersection and turn left on the next road and drive to where the truck trailers were parked. Since I had never been there, I assumed that this would be the back side of an industrial park.
I passed through the light at the main intersection and turned on the first left…
Very quickly, it became obvious that we were NOT in an industrial park. We were in hilly, wooded countryside. “No Trespassing” signs were posted at regular intervals on the right side of this curved road.
About 1/2 mile down, we saw a sign “National Archives and Administration” pointing to a closed gate to the right. The road ended by curving to the left into a parking lot nearly full of trailers.
My first thought was, “This looks like a place where people disappear forever. This can’t be right.”
Then I saw a 3′ x 4′ sign nailed to a post with about 40 companies listed with their phone numbers. The guy’s company was on the list so this had to be the right place. Maybe each of these companies stores stuff in those trailers?
A woman in a minivan drove past us. I didn’t think anything of it. She was probably going to meet her husband to get something out of one of the trailers.
I grew a little bored after a few minutes of waiting and turned to see what the woman in the minivan was doing. There was no minivan! It was gone!
I had not looked very closely but the road didn’t end in the trailer filled parking lot. It went into the side of a hill!!!
It looked like a setting in the TV series “24”! My wife started looking for Jack Bauer!
Just then the guy showed up and told us to follow him. We then drove into the opening in the side of the hill to a security checkpoint. We signed in and then drove into this HUGE (over 2 million square feet) underground cavern! There were 25′ x 25′ white rock pillars every 25′ as far as our eyes could see in each direction.
If you can imagine, it looked like this:
X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X
The X’s represent the 25′ pillars. The white space was big enough for two 18 wheelers!
It turns out that this was a reclaimed limestone mine. (Limestone is the primary ingredient in concrete.) After the mining was finished, a company bought the property, poured the concrete, installed plumbing and electricity and built warehouse space. It is 68º year round with no heating or cooling!
Oh, yeah…I got a nice Steelcase Criterion chair (retail $1,200) and a Steelcase two drawer filing cabinet (retail $768) for $150!!!
