“Luxury,” as an adjective, is effectively meaningless. What makes a Cadillac a luxury car? Their ads say it is, so it is. Meaningless words do not, in themselves, annoy me much although they do provide fodder for endless meaningless chatter. Since I try to avoid listening to such chatter, my response is a resounding “meh.”
The problem is that some people – If I’m being honest, I’d say I believe that the topic at hand is “stupid people” – think that their asses deserve kissing because they bought something labelled “luxury.”
Chez__B was originally an office building constructed as a money-making venture by the bank that occupied the large first-floor space. The grand entrance off the street leads to the bank hall, with a smaller entrance down the block leading to the elevators for the other floors. As part of the residential conversion, a vestibule was installed at the elevator entrance (now the residential lobby) with a door at the street wall and a door about seven feet inwards at the interior lobby wall. (The seven feet is obviously not solid wall, but is where one of the emergency stairs is located.) During the four years we’ve lived in the building (we were among the first residents after the conversion was complete), the interior door of the vestibule has almost never been closed. It is propped open, effectively permanently. Two other physical facts of note: the concierge desk is immediately adjacent to the inner door and it is equipped with a closed-circuit TV that shows the sidewalk outside the outer door. The TV allows the concierges to see if they have to go to the door and help someone.
The other thread of this story comes via Google Groups. The residents established a group before we moved in for general building discussion. I joined and lurk. I don’t participate because reading the comments there quickly convinced me that my fellow tenants are largely a bunch of entitled, whiney yuppies and hipsters. A common refrain is “Why is such-and-such true IN A LUXURY BUILDING?!?” A recent thread discussed spending somewhere in the high five figures to reconfigure the lobby because the concierge desk was very cold during the winter.
Yesterday, I asked one of the concierges why he didn’t close the inner door, since treating the vestibule as an actual vestibule would do a great deal towards stopping cold drafts at his desk. His response was that people had complained of difficulties with baby carriages or shopping carts when the door was closed. In other words, the extra couple of seconds it takes the concierge to help an encumbered person when both doors are closed had spawned enough complaints that he was sitting there in the cold. Because IN A LUXURY BUILDING twelve seconds to get through the door is unacceptable when ten seconds is possible.
The core of my profession, the core of engineering design is making tradeoffs between various goals. Less expensive up front means more maintenance. More functionality means more complex controls. Better looking means more expensive. And so on. The people in my building believe that their sense of luxury outweighs the human comfort of a half-dozen men – their employees – who they see every day. I wish I could say it’s just this building, but judging by the people I meet in my work and what I see of national politics, it’s not. Fuck them all and fuck their luxury.
