Monarch

The office is in a building that is 100 years old.  116 years old, really.  It’s a brick building, painted over several times.  Two quick-service restaurants are in the lower floor.  The bathrooms are only accessible with a key because a number of homeless people hang out in the small park just across the street – if the bathrooms were publicly accessible, homeless men would clean up there.  Or live there in the cold or hot weather.  Not really good for business.  But it sucks to have to tell your clients they need your key to use the bathroom.  On the plus side, it is easy to schedule a lunch very close to the office. 

 

The building smells.  Like old paper.  The businesses inside vary.  Lawyers in solo practice.  Medical billing firms.  Some very small production companies.  A jewelry repair shop.  A shoe repair shop.  The building owners also run a company that makes “smart” water, whatever that is.  You have to use the elevators to go upstairs.  This is also to protect from homeless people.  Plus, once you are on a floor, you can only exit via the stairs to the ground floor – again, for safety. 

 

The building locks at 6 and requires special entry via a digital “key.”

 

His office is 125 square feet.  The rent is very low for downtown.  The location is ideal for a number of the occupants.  Rent payment is generally flexible.  His business is somewhat slow – but the office is a nice (and mostly quiet) place for him to write, to think, and to masturbate. 

 

He started seeing clients there recently.  Clients of a vaguely defined business enterprise.  Most paid him in cash.  One particularly exasperating project earned him a year’s supply of free frozen yogurt and $25. 

 

Most of his client engagements lasted two to three months.  He couldn’t quite explain that phenomenon.  But it paid the rent and his bills.  You know food and the cost of maintaining a red Mercury Monarch.