Chattanooga Pulse

Contrary to some popular belief, I do have a day job. If I relied on my Pulse compensation to support me, I’d likely be “living in a van down by the river.” My main gig is in marketing with BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee. And along with thousands more like me in the Noog—I just moved to Cameron Hill.

For the past seven-and-a-half years, I’ve worked in the “gold building”. That’s the no-pun-intended gilded-glass building on the corner of Pine Street and Highway 27. It was built back in 1970 by an architect who at the time was making a name for himself designing Hyatt hotels. And if you’ve ever been inside that building, you’ll know what I’m talking about. One-trick pony, that guy.

But because of his limited design prowess, the building has a very ’70s coolness about it that I suspect was lost on most of the worker bees who’d been there for a while. Tubular elevators in an exposed sky-lit center atrium, dark-wood walls and circular patterns of ceramic floor tiles had me humming the theme to The Bob Newhart Show (the one set in Chicago, not Vermont) on my first day of work.

The Pine building is now 39 years old, but believe or not it was the newest in the BlueCross fleet. So for efficiency’s sake and to get (most) everyone in the same place, we finally built the campus that unintentionally might appear to be as alluring as the Emerald City in the Land of Oz to the office dwellers left below. In fact, if I have to answer the question of why the lights have been on at night one more time I will explode. Read the papers. It’s because people are working up there. But I digress.

Since February or so, we’ve slowly been moving people up to the new campus at a rate of 250 per week. And for those of us who were within the last thousand or so scheduled to move, the suspense was killing us—especially the rumors coming down about what to expect once we’re on “the hill.”

This mysterious place, suspected by some outsiders to be a modern-day “land of milk and honey”, was to be much different than what we’d become accustomed to in our old digs. “They’ve got free coffee and spring water on every floor.” “The salads in the cafeteria are as big as your head and cost seven dollars.” “They don’t have a fryer, so no French fries.” “The natural light is blinding.” “The cubes are smaller, and have no privacy so you can’t spend all day on the phone with mom’en’em.” The rumors got better every time you heard one.

Even though I had opportunity to visit the new campus on several occasions over the past year or so, I decided not to spoil the surprise and wait until moving day to take it all in. And on June 8, I showed up for my first day of work at One Cameron Hill Circle, building one (which is the one furthest from MLK), level two, cube 1.2E53.

“Surreal” may be the most appropriate, yet inadequate, word for the whole experience. Everything is very modern and totally unlike the “Blue” I’d known up to now. I actually overheard people make comments like: “I feel like I work for a big company now,” (???), and “I feel like I switched jobs and all of my coworkers came with me.”

It was weird to say the least. And regardless of which rumors were true or false, the place rocks. There’s a CVS pharmacy onsite, a state-of-the-art workout facility, a Mongolian grill in the cafeteria and rumors of a smoothie place and high-end coffee stand coming soon. There’s designer furniture, herb gardens, a huge covered atrium between the buildings and a walking trail around the hill. Each cube, although smaller, has its own temperature control and all-ergonomic amenities. And I haven’t had to wind through a parking garage that big since my last flight out of Atlanta.

But you know what? At the end of the day, it’s really all just cubicles, copiers, computers and comrades. There’s nothing a “palace on the hill” can do to replace work. But it sure is a nice place to spend my nine-to-five.

Chuck Crowder is a local writer and general man about town. His opinions are just that. Everything expressed is loosely based on fact, and crap he hears people talking about. Take what you just read with a grain of salt, but pepper it in your thoughts. And be sure to check out his wildly popular website  www.thenoog.com