As I mentioned the other day, while working at the Washington Ireland Program (WIP), we had extra help during the summer to run the program. Since this increased our office staff significantly, we had to rent summer office space.

That first summer, we had a pretty decent set up in an office building in Washington’s West End. We were down the street from a Walgreen’s that sold everything from sundresses to watermelon. If you needed something, it was likely to have it. We were also right next to Bread and Chocolate, where the employees did not understand the need for water heated in a kettle, versus the microwave, for tea. much to the disgust of Ciaran.

I’m not sure they loved us as tenants but we tried to be good office mates to the other people who were renting office space there. To be fair, it wasn’t just us – we shared the space with our sister organization SAWIP and we had any number of the 30+ people on the program that summer in and out of the offices.

Late one afternoon, a workman came in and basically drywalled us into the office, it almost seemed to be a joke. They installed a wall in the hallway that led to our offices that blocked us out of the rest of the office space.  I remember thinking of some movie I’d seen where they killed someone by this way – walling them in a room with no way out. In this scenario though, there was a side door in our office area, but we didn’t use to get in our offices because we didn’t have a key.

I walked out that side door, in the front door and asked the guy in charge how we were supposed to get in our office. He looked totally puzzled – as if he had totally forgotten we were back there. He sort of brushed it off with a statement about using that side door. When I asked about a key for it, he called the maintenance guy, who didn’t have a key. After a lot of back and forth, they finally got a key for it.

I would like to say that was the most bizarre thing that happened that summer but honestly, it wasn’t. In fact, it was just a normal day at the WIP office.

While they didn’t technically brick us in, I thought Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” was a good choice for today from my IPod.