The vault at my new offices

I’ve already mentioned how my work moved to a new office (near the deliciously evil Kenny & Zuke’s, and Powell’s Books), but what I don’t think I mentioned is that the building was the former location of a federal reserve bank (a branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco). The building is big, and SuperSweetCo will, once the build-out is completed, have 3 floors (two standard floors and a penthouse with some outdoor patio space). One cool bonus though was something I saw a couple months back on a tour of the building, only at the time I didn’t have my camera with me. The basement level has this massive vault, the kind of thing you’d typically only ever see in movies. Last Friday I had my camera with me so I snapped a few photos.

In the process of taking this shot, I had to unhook the door from the wall and swing it out a bit, and that got a little scary for a moment. The door, being so massive, didn’t want to budge, so I had to put all my weight into it to move it. However once it got going, I suddenly realized that it wasn’t going to stop, so I had to dig my heels in and pull with all I could to stop it before it swung closed, crushing the ventilation that has been added into the door frame over the past month or two. I got a couple more photos of it so you can see the how thick the door is, and what the inside of the door looks when it’s fully opened and latched to the wall. Pretty effin’ cool.

I think my employers should arrange my office inside the vault, complete with banks of levers, buttons, little blinking lights, absorption wavemeters, tesla coils, assorted chemistry equipment (things that smoke and bubble are a must), and dark spooky music. My mad/brilliant scientist dream would be complete. “We must now descend to the vaults, and see what Doktor Designer has stumbed upon.”