The Naked Man Across the Street

Since I'm too broke to lust about any new handbags, and gossip is just on snooze these days, I'm going to tell you a story from my life experience. A long time ago back in 1998, when I had a real job working as an auditor, I was assigned to an audit on the top floor of a really tall building in New York City. I was part of a team of about six auditors and the work was extremely light. So to fill up our downtime, we used to call into radio shows to win some prize of the day, or surf the internet (there wasn't much stuff back then but still), sit around and talk, and best of all, observe what was going on outside through the large windows in the audit room. People watching has long been a past time of New Yorkers, but we took it to a higher level.

The building across the street from where we worked was a typical NYC building. At the street level, there were shops like cafes, bookstores, salons, grocers. Above those shops there were stories of apartments. We started watching the people living in the apartments in the building across the street. These were the people who conveniently never closed their drapes during the day, or simply didn't have drapes. We got to know the tenants pretty well. There was the college kid with the brown leather couch who used to just play video games or talk on the phone all day. He had a giant screen TV and used to invite his college buddies over regularly for pizza parties and football. He was really getting his parent's money worth of college tuition. Above him lived this guy who never wore clothes. He was the most interesting.

It used to baffle us how this man, who NEVER seemed to leave the apartment, would never put on clothes. He used to wake up at noon, eat cereal while standing at the window reading a book, and he even used to workout, stark naked! He used a Total Gym for his workouts. We didn't look at him continuously, we weren't that lame, but it was one of those things we did when we were bored with the other work we were doing, and someone would pipe up, "hey, what's the naked guy doing now?" and someone would be on the lookout and give us the daily update. One day, one of my co-workers got a glimps of full frontal nudity. That was pretty gross, because this was one hairy dude.

Not content at just watching him do nothing all day, one of my co-workers decided to spice things up a bit by trying to find out his phone number. He was successful by walking over to the building and looking up the guy's exact address. He did a reverse telephone lookup on the internet and he was set. On the days the naked guy wasn't doing much, my co-worker would phone him, and we would all watch with glee as he would walk over to the phone. My co-worker would hang up the phone before he answered. We played this game about eight times before it became lame and we stopped. Yes, we were all 24 year old college graduates, some with MBA's like me , playing ding dong ditch on the naked guy. We really should have acted more mature, but blogging was not in full swing back then, and luckily for us, neither was Caller ID.

Like all good things, that audit assignment came to an end, and I made some wonderful friends at that job whom I still miss. But I would like to thank that naked guy for helping us all bond during that hoplessly boring audit.