Things are pretty ugly in our nation’s capital. Via BuzzFeed comes this article chock full of pictures of some of the worst buildings in Washington, D.C. Well, I guess it’s only fitting that we house our crappy government in appropriately crappy office space.
I actually had the misfortune of working in two of them and had occasion to visit most of the others during my long years of government service. L’Enfant Plaza housed Postal Service Headquarters. I technically only worked there for a few months in the summer of 1998 during collective bargaining agreement negotiations with the National Association of Letter Carriers. Many other days were wasted there for mindless meetings with the HQ brass though. I also spent five soul-sucking years working within the walls of the Department of Education building. How bad was it? I preferred working in Iraq and actively pursued employment there, albeit without success. I did wind up in Korea though and that was almost like being reborn after all those hellish years in D.C.
Which is why catching the Virginia Railway Express at L’Enfant station for the last time filled me with unbridled joy…
Ah, yes… NALC. My mother used to work there, at First and C Streets, close to the Capitol. DC is an odd mishmash of often-clashing architecture, sitting atop poorly laid-out streets designed by a demented Frenchman. You can find a small measure of sanity in the rigid gridwork of the Georgetown University/Foxhall neighborhoods, but that’s about it. DC was designed for carriages, not cars. And plenty of its neighborhoods are fugly.
I’m thinking it is likely that I may have seen your mom at NALC headquarters during one of my numerous visits there. Of course, she would have just been another face to me then.