As mentioned in this recent post, I worked, for a spell, at the website of “The TODAY Show.” In a nutshell, sensibility-wise, it was really not a great fit for me. Essentially, the program and its accompanying website (for which I was a homepage editor) cater to a very specific demographic with fairly mainstream tastes. To put it very mildly, I did not and do not share a great deal of affinity for the stories, subjects and guests we regularly featured. By the same token, it was a good, steady job, paid well and I worked with some genuinely amazing people, many of whom I am still great friends with today.
That said, there was a pronounced sea change within the overall organization during my tenure there and the office culture changed somewhat radically after I’d been there a couple of years. There came a great cleaning of house and a re-org, and I started answering to other managers. In short order, the scrutiny was turned way up. I was out of my depth and a bit overwhelmed, and was basically “managed out” of the organization with a ruthless efficiency. That’s about all I’ll say about that.
As a result, 30 Rockefeller Plaza is very much not a place you’re likely to find me voluntarily hanging around, not just because I don’t work in that building anymore, but because the circumstances of my carefully orchestrated departure were fairly fraught (well, for me, anyway). In the grand scheme of things, leaving the place was the best thing that could have happened, but one generally prefers to leave on one’s own terms, which was not at all the way it went down.
So, when news broke today that Rough Trade NYC – recently unmoored from its airplane-hangar-sized original perch in Williamsburg, Brooklyn --- was relocating to … WAIT FOR IT … 30 Rockefeller Plaza (literally four flights directly beneath the roiling, orange-walled, windowless chamber of trauma that was my former office), my enthusiasm was somewhat muted. It seems like a strenuously unlikely place for a shop that caters rather specifically to indie, alternative and underground music, but hey …. what the Hell do I know?
May they have a thousand times more success than I experienced at that address.
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