One NYC Facilities Manager’s Observations and Ponderings on COVID-19
I was a Facilities Manager during the Big Apple’s most trying of times: 9/11 and the 2003 Blackout. After walking home from both events, I looked at my wife and said, “If I have to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge one more time, we are moving.” We did end up moving to New Jersey in 2005 but not because of my walks across my favorite city landmark.
When the 2007 steam-pipe explosion happened in Midtown Manhattan, causing havoc in a time when “working from home” was just learning to commando crawl, it gave me my first real taste of Business Continuity. And then Hurricane Sandy happened in 2012, which didn’t really impact my Midtown office but was devastatingly felt throughout the five boroughs.
And let’s not forget the 2016 pipe-bomb explosion that put a dent in our Chelsea neighborhood. It impacted access to our 8th Ave building and made global news as a possible terrorist attack, but after curiously walking past the area on 23rd Street, it didn’t seem to be that big of a deal because nobody got hurt or perished.
Now my company’s brand-new office is in the Wall Street neighborhood. The new World Trade Center stands magnanimously, overshadowing everything except for the 9/11 Memorial, which is just a stone’s throw away. The Lower Manhattan of 2020 is a totally different scene than the Lower Manhattan of 2001. The streets are now alive and bustling, when 19 years ago it was complete devastation, chaos and carnage. I remember standing on Broadway with my family members who were in town for my upcoming wedding, as the Twin Towers were reduced to a pile of rubble.
After experiencing all of these events and 20 years of Corporate Facilities experience, I thought I had seen and survived everything, and then COVID-19 reared its ugly head and things quickly became very surreal.
Unlike the events mentioned above, where everyone ran for safety before slowly coming back, this pesky virus is clearing the commuting trains, subways and city streets with each passing workday. Want proof? When I first started writing this article, I was on a peak, rush-hour train back to the New Jersey suburbs and I was the only one sitting in the train car. When I arrived at mystop, the same stop I’ve had for the last 15 years, I didn’t recognize any of the newer, younger faces exiting the train.
They were obviously town newbies who are low on the corporate ladder and who still have some years of professional blood, sweat and tears to sacrifice. At least I found some normalcy seeing Girl Scouts and their moms selling cookies outside of the train station.
Fast forward three weeks…. it is now a ghost town in The City That Never Sleeps and many parts of the United States. My quirky New Jersey town has somehow, impossibly, become even more quirky.
The President of the United States just decided not to quarantine most of the NYC Tri-State area. National/global cases and deaths continue to mount as quickly as the unemployment numbers. And as if the blaring silence isn’t creepy enough, more and more people are wearing disposable masks, using hand sanitizers in epically unhealthy doses and rinsing and reusing disposable gloves, even wearing winter gloves. In the spirit of “social distancing,” some are going through great pains to avoid any physical contact that otherwise would be considered rude. Initially irked, I am just writing off the Purell handshakes and “elbow bumps” (if even that) as a just sign of the bizarre times we are living in.
The last time I checked the CDC website, one could not contract the virus via eye contact, yet many pass by me in my otherwise friendly town with their eyes glued to the ground now. Many are scared and rightfully so. A week or two later, my company office finally closed, and like many of my neighbors, I am working remotely until further notice, a strange experience for a Facilities Manager. However, I am still very busy, working 10 hours per day in the home office brainstorming workarounds so that my company can still conduct business.
Currently, I am looking under every rock and thinking way outside the box to procure disinfectant cleaning supplies for our 40 national offices that remain open. When I am not working with HR on notifying Property Managers about positive COVID-19 cases in our offices, I am working with the latter and their cleaning companies to deep clean offices per CDC guidelines. I am also keeping renovation projects going in areas that haven’t been impacted by “shelter in place” declarations – at least not today.
And that is the truly nutty thing about all of this. Unlike all of the NYC-centric events mentioned above, this pandemic is truly worldly, impacting the entire globe. My brain is so accustomed to NYC-centric emergencies that I still have to remind myself a month later that this current situation reaches much farther beyond the five boroughs.
But in all this nutty, creepy, weirdness — like 9/11, Hurricane Sandy and other past, dire events — I remain positive that we will recover, even from this recent challenge. We have no other choice. And that is why my faith remains. We won’t get through this virus mess unscathed, but when we do make it through we will have learned new perspectives and approaches that we may have thought about but are now forced to pursue. And when all of this is said and done, at least now I can say I have seen everything….short of an alien invasion….when is that scheduled again?
Paul Haley CFM, FMP, Facilities Manager at Wolters Kluwer Governance, Risk & Compliance Division & IFMA NYC Communications Committee Member
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