Hoping for a stroke of luck

I’m flying down to Florida with a team of colleagues today to pay another visit to one of my clients. We’re supposed to be participating in all day brainstorming sessions over the next few days to discuss overhauling some of their existing programs, but we’ve just learned that the primary client, the one who we need to approve any changes, can no longer make it, so we're still going, but the value of the trip is a little up in the air right now.

The situation reminds me of the time a team of us flew out to visit a client in Silicon Valley a few years ago. We were presenting the findings of an analysis we’d spent 6months working on with our client and this was our once in a lifetime opportunity to present to her board of directors. We spent weeks preparing only for an emergency board meeting to be scheduled at the eleventh hour. There we were, all ready to go, with our all singing and dancing presentation and instead of presenting to the powers that be, the holders of the purse strings, we flew all the way out to California only to end up presenting to a team of interns.

Some you win… :-)

Preparing for the brainstorming sessions has been intense, but happily I had a lovely and relaxing weekend to soothe my jangled nerves. I stayed at Tel Aviv’s place for much of it, which was very nice. He has a fabulous, airy apartment in the Financial District, right off Wall St. It’s a neighbourhood I never spent much time in until recently, so I'm enjoying the change of scenery. It’s been touted as an up and coming residential area for the past few years now, although I think they may have even been saying that when I first moved to New York in the summer of 2000. That year, on the hunt for a place to live, I saw a gorgeous 2bedroom apartment in that area on John St, for $3,000 a month, which I considered sharing with 2 other potential housemates I’d met online. We were planning to put up a dividing wall to split the large living room and create a 3rd bedroom, a fairly common practise in New York, but we missed out on the apartment and I ended up taking a share in a large place on the Upper East Side instead. The UES apartment was nice, but nowhere near as beautiful as the downtown place which was in a building newly converted from office space to apartments, something that’s happening a lot down there. Tel Aviv’s apartment building used to be a bank and when they did the conversion they retained the black marble lobby. It’s funny when you first walk in as it still has like a bank like feel even though it’s very plush and on my first visit I remember wondering if I’d entered one of the nearby office buildings by mistake.

One of the reasons we missed out on the beautiful apartment in the Financial District back in 2000 was our hesitation about living in that neighbourhood so another apartment hunter with no such qualms beat us to it. My biggest concern was how lonely the area might feel at night, since, like the city of London, it can feel pretty deserted after office hours, bars and restaurants are few and far between, and as for a place to buy groceries? Forget it. There’s nothing down there, so when I pictured myself living down there I saw myself jittery and jumping at my own shadow on the way home from the pub of a weekend evening.

Seven years later I’ve learned that it’s actually pretty hopping down there, well, comparatively hopping to the tumbleweeds I expected. There still isn't much in the way of bars or restaurants, but at least Fresh Direct - the local online grocery store - delivers to the area and there are tons of people walking around, workers, residents and tourists, my God the area is teeming with tourists. They're everywhere, snapping photos outside the Stock Exchange, draping themselves over the statue of Washington or lining up to rub the bronze bollocks of the Wall St bullock in Bowling Green Park. Apparently bullock bollock stroking is purported to bring good luck. Who knew?

There’s no bear on Wall St, only the bull, and I’d previously assumed this had something to do with the bull being the more optimistic of the two symbols of the financial markets, and that traders were likely a sufficiently superstitious bunch to not be too keen to risk a run of financial hardship by the presence of such an ominous symbol, however a quick peek on Wikipedia reveals a more interesting back story…

“The sculpture, however, was not commissioned by the city as a work of public art. Rather, Di Modica created it on his own (at a personal cost of some $360,000) and installed it in December 15, 1989 as "guerrilla art", trucking it to Lower Manhattan and placing it in front of the New York Stock Exchange as a Christmas gift to the people of New York.”

I’m just trying to picture the scene with the artist – in my mind wearing a beret, smock and clutching a paint palette and bearing more than a passing resemblance to Peter Sellers playing Inspector Clouseau – trundling along in a big lorry in the middle of the night on a stealth mission to drop off a 7000lb bronze bull on Broadway :-)

Wikipedia goes on to say…

“The police seized the illegal sculpture and placed it into an impound lot. In response to the public outcry favo(u)ring the sculpture, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation re-installed it several blocks away to its current location in the plaza at Bowling Green where it faces up Broadway”

And they’ve been fondling his testicles ever since

Speaking of luck, my friend Kimberley in London could do with a bit of that at the moment. The baby she’s expecting is more than a week overdue and the delay is driving her crazy. She’s trying every 'old wives cure in the book to try and bring on labour as the alternative is that she'll be induced, something that is apparently more than a little bit painful. Yes…worse than childbirth!!! She’s been eating fresh pineapple, taking hot baths, going for long walks, and engaging in vigorous sex – something she claims is not so easy for a woman of her current dimensions. She’s saving her final weapon - the fiery hot curry - until Wednesday night, so fingers crossed it does the trick. However if the curry doesn’t work and the baby is still a no show by the time I’m back from Florida, I think I’ll pop down to Wall St and give the bull a tickle on Kim’s behalf. You never know ;-)

Top Photo Credit: Rithviks @ Flickr

Above Photo Credit: "Tourists & The Bull" Dahliapics @ Flickr