A Small World at 1255

New York City's international diversity never ceases to impress me - even when sitting in my own kitchen! Over lunch our Malaysian housekeeper, Moy, (who, in addition to Malay and English, speaks Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Thai, and some Japanese - leaving me to often ponder whether she couldn't find more lucrative work elsewhere) began inquiring about the nationalities of the various gentleman working in our apartment this afternoon. Turns out we had two painters from Chile (Gabe and Italo) and one computer guy from Argentina (Lucio), both assisted by our Ukrainian superintendent (Peter) and rung up our Latvian doorman (Yuri). Anyway you cut it, that's a pretty broad swath of the global landscape represented in one tiny apartment. And I'm not even counting my other doorman - a Spanish-speaking second-generation American named Ismael - who's background I never have quited pinned down.

Predictably, the only worker to disappoint this afternoon was the one native born American: a Time Warner Cable rep (Jimmy) who balked at having to crawl under the floor in my brother's room in order to reach the cable wires. Can't blame him. As my ingenious father designed it, you literally have to lift a trap door in the floor, drop down into a little crawl space, and slither commando style toward a gaggle of wires. My superintendent's instructions for even accessing this crawl space seemed clipped from a Ukrainian Legends of the Hidden Temple:

Reid, stand in your brather's room facing the air conditioner. Move the stone elephant sculpture toward the desk. Now stand with one foot on the exercise machine and one on the window sill. See the little hole in the right corner between the air conditioner and the bed? Stick your finger down there and pull up the piece of the floor.

Upon finally lifting the trap door, I found no silver monkey waiting assembly - only lots of dust and, oddly, a miniature wicker chair from our old country house that for some reason my dad saw fit to store underground. Jimmy the cable guy promptly declined to crawl into the whole, informing me that "We don't get paid enough to crawl." Anyhow, at least my floor-lifting skills impressed Peter - he only half-jokingly offered to hire me as his assistant (news of unemployment travels fast in this building). Regrettably, I'll have to decline Peter's offer. With my dad planning a major renovation of the living room, our little fiefdom of international laborers will grow by the day. If I actually had a job, who would there be to celebrate this tapestry?