Jake lived in New York City as a technical writer. He hadn’t planned to become a technical writer, but you know, things happen, plans are made, then broken. Basically, he graduated with a Princeton English degree, moved to the City and surprise, short of teaching, there wasn’t much for which he was qualified. He tried teaching and discovered how brutal subbing is, especially in the Bronx. He tried one day and just thought, ‘nope, nope, nope, I’d move home to Tulsa before I tried that again’.

He signed up with a temp agency and started working that same day for Mid-Continent Fiduciary Mutual writing beginning guides to help their traders obey the law or at least stay within certain bounds. They basically sold retirees mutual funds, kind of a poorer version of Fidelity. Most days he’d work from his room or really the coffee shop on the corner. He lived in a large walk-in closet in an apartment that he shared with three roommates. It was a two-bedroom walkup in Queens in a Co-op. They only paid $2000 a month for their rent-controlled apartment. Wade, one of his roommates who moved into the apartment after his grandfather died, held the lease.

The apartment dwellers had to exit the building every morning at fifteen-minute intervals and always use the back stairway which opened into an alleyway next to the dumpster. Wade watched them closely. He also didn’t allow any of them to bring in any furniture (except in Jake’s case - a convertible futon, a 36” TV and a Furinno Adjustable Tray which Jake used as a dinner table and a workspace). Jake didn’t have a printer, there was a print shop on the corner to which he’d upload documents when he needed copies made.

It was a little like having a tiny house. Hey for $500 a month rent in the city, Jake was willing to make the sacrifice. His college student loans were not huge, about $40,000 so he only needed to come up with about $400 bucks a month. He was trying to double or even triple the amount he paid monthly in order to get them paid off early. He’d been doing that for the two years he’d been living in the city and he could see the impact of his payment strategy working. Jake kept a Google sheet where he tracked basically every penny. Only a year to a year and a half to go!

Anyway on Monday mornings, he had a regular meeting that he had to attend at Mid-Continent Fiduciary Mutual. It was his staff’s ‘Come to Jesus’ meeting. As a temp, he absolutely had to be there, and, of course, he was late. He’d missed his regular leaving time and Wade had let Andy go. That meant he couldn’t leave for 15 minutes which meant that he was in all likelihood going to be late. It was his fault, he overslept, didn’t hear the alarm. If Mobo, the Nigerian investment banker, who had the room his closet was attached to hadn’t knocked on his door and said, “Jake, don’t you have a staff meeting on Monday’s,” he would have overslept and had no chance of making the meeting, but now, he was sitting in the living room, looking at Wade, trying to get him to let him out of the apartment early. There was a zero percent chance of that.

Wade is a little man. Jake is not. Jake is about 6’3” and 250 pounds. Wade is about 5’2” and 180 pounds. Wade used to be bigger, over 200 pounds, but for the past year had been on a weird diet that caused him to smell. A little, not much, but it was noticeable. Jake being the largest person in the apartment might have caused some of their problems. Jake was also voted in by the others in the apartment over Wade’s no vote. It’s kind of a long story, but the apartment has a government. Wade is the Apartment Leader while everyone else has a vote in the Apartment Congress. Wade is in charge of making the rules of the apartment; however, at the weekly house meetings held on Sunday nights, the dwellers within can overrule him if everyone in the apartment votes no.

Wade does a pretty bad job of running the place. He makes up a lot of rules, which no one really understands. Oh, the rules make sense, just not the need for making them. The entrance and exit strategy rules were the first rules that he put into place. Nobody wanted to lose the apartment, so the group at the time all went along with it. The Coop board was a stickler for the rules but seemed to only pursue rule breakers that the neighbor’s complained about. He followed that with the no furniture rule after the first roommate moved out and caused a big problem with his movers, a toilet seat down rule, a no dishes in the sink rule, a don’t use the Coop laundry rule, a no wet towels left in the bathroom rule, a 15 minute bathroom time limit rule, etc. Believe it or not, there’s an actual printed document. Once again, nobody wanted to lose the apartment and, frankly, the place is a sausage fest so nobody really cares. Everyone just adapted to living with Wade’s grandfather’s furnishings and the rest of the rules. Besides, the grandpa’s furniture is all vintage and looks kind of cool.

Anyway, this led to the current situation. Jake, sitting on Wade’s grandfather’s couch in the apartment living room, looking at the countdown timer. Wade, sitting at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, reading the Times and doing the crossword. It was a square clock about 10” x 3” high that one of the previous roommates had bought off of amazon. It showed a countdown from fifteen minutes to zero, whereupon it started over. It was at 2 minutes. Wade was usually the last person to leave. He was also an IT manager and didn’t leave the apartment until 9ish so the morning rush didn’t really matter to him. Let any of his direct reports be late to a staff meeting, oh, the agony!

Jake stood up. Wade looked over at the clock. Jake sat down. Wade looked back at his crossword.

The clock showed one minute, Jake stood up again.

Wade looked up and said, “Rules Jake.” There’s a whole history behind this statement. These words, uttered in that precise tone of voice Wade inevitably used to utter them, were probably the single-most common reason anyone leaves the apartment, despite the rent.

Jake said, “I know, just getting ready” and then stood by the door until the countdown timer hit zero and pulled it open and left, not looking back. Jake quickly walked, ‘Don’t run in the building' was rule #10, to the backstairs and made his way quickly down to the alley and out onto the street.

Baxter was a labradoodle. He was a year and a half old, which meant that he was basically full-sized but still acted like a puppy. He was one of the estimated 600,000 dogs that lived in New York City. He lived for three things: Chow, His Owner, and his daily trips to the dog park.

Ordinarily, he spent the day napping waiting for his owner, Clive, to get back and take him out for his evening playtime and then with him to the local Chinese food place to buy dinner.

Clive had recently started seeing someone though and it was seriously cutting into his Baxter time. That morning he had stumbled into the apartment smelling of her and I’m so sorry Bax old buddy but I’m so, so late and had taken him to the dog park for just long enough for Baxter to take care of his doggie business and then he was rushed back to the apartment.

Normally Baxter was given at least 30 minutes to run and play. He especially loved to chase pigeons that were rude enough to come inside the dog park. However today, he didn’t get a chance to burn off any of his puppy energy. No playing with the other dogs, no chasing pigeons, no barking at squirrels, just pee, poop and back to the apartment. He lay down on his dog bed after Clive left, listening to the sounds of the apartment building.

On top of the air conditioner that Clive installed in one of the windows, a pigeon landed and began cooing in that irritating way that they had and walking like a little Fuehrer back and forth on a parade ground. Coo, Coo.

Baxter looked up, sighed and lay back down, but the pigeon just kept walking and making that noise. Finally, Baxter stood up and walked over to the window. The pigeon looked at him, head cocked, then ignored him and kept walking and cooing.

Baxter barked, once.

The pigeon kept walking and cooing.

Baxter barked again claiming this space including the top of the air conditioner that the pigeon was walking on as part of his and Clive’s territory.

The blasted pigeon just ignored him and kept announcing itself to the world from Baxter’s clearly claimed space.

This wouldn’t do so Baxter let loose with a peal of barks, a veritable chorus. Enough so that the neighbor began pounding on the wall. Baxter, of course, took this to mean that the neighbor too was upset with the pigeon claiming a part of their space and began jumping up and barking at the pigeon, ramming the air conditioner in the process.

The thing that you have to know about Clive is that he is not a handy man. He approaches a screwdriver as if it were a surgical instrument. When he installed the air conditioning unit, he looked over the instructions which clearly stated that braces needed to be installed on the outside of the window, considered the fact that that meant he would have to be outside the window, looked at the three-story potential fall beneath him, and then looked at the window frame and the small security bracket that you’d screw in the frame to prevent the window from opening and decided, apropos of nothing, that that security bracket would work to hold the air conditioner in its place because the window frame was actually doing all the work.

He may have been right, provided something like an 80-pound dog wasn’t jumping and hitting the air conditioner’s face. After the second bump, the security bracket, a thin piece of L-shaped metal, broke and shot into the room, ricocheting off the window’s face. The air conditioner, heavy with its load of ice, groaned once and fell out of the window.

The pigeon flew up into the air with a flurry of feathers and a loud flapping noise. Baxter was satisfied with this result until the pigeon returned to the window ledge.

Meanwhile the air conditioner plummeted to the side-walk below fortunately just missing landing on Jake as he was run-walking down the sidewalk. Unfortunately for Jake the front of the air conditioner shot out like a hard thrown frisbee and nailed him in the shin.

Jake who had just danced back from the exploding, crashing air conditioner, quit looking up at the window from which the air conditioner had fallen and grabbed his shin and started doing a little hopping pain-dance there on the sidewalk.

There were other people on the sidewalk, but they weren’t as close and being typical New Yorkers immediately pulled out their cell phones and began filming the scene for posting and possible litigation purposes.

It’s too bad that Jake quit looking upwards because if he had he might have been able to avert what happened next, probably not, but at least he would have had a chance.

Baxter was not happy with this result. The humming thing in the window was gone, along with the pigeon’s perch, but the pigeon was still there.

The thing about Baxter is that he never really got the concept of heights. Clive didn’t really pick him up and when he did he quickly set him down again. The dog park was just a level concrete surface, the highest place he could reach in the apartment was Clive’s bed or the couch, neither one of which he was supposed to get on, so to him the world was a fairly level place, a place one could freely leap around upon.

So, when the pigeon returned to its windowsill roost, Baxter leaped out expecting to land on a floor just like the apartment’s and use it to chase off the annoying pigeon.

Sadly, he was wrong and proceeded to plummet just like the air conditioner that had preceded him. Stunned by the, new to him, sensation of falling, he looked down and watched the ground and the Clive-like man apparently rushing toward him.

A woman filming the sidewalk and having just panned to the window where the air conditioner had fallen from, caught Baxter’s leap perfectly and was able to follow the dog downward while keeping him perfectly in focus until Jake and Baxter’s heads collided in a messy cloud of intermingled brain matter, blood and skull bits, killing both of them instantly.

Fortunately for both Baxter and Jake, this was the moment that the world ended. Not in a bang or a whimper, just a quiet change of control. The actual notifications to the tenants wouldn’t happen for a few weeks and the apocalypse wouldn’t start until a month after that, but the rules changed along with the owners and ...

Woh there, hoss! Hosses??

How ‘bout we bring you in for a little chat!