Welcome back to any and all readers. To those, if any, who have not read part I yet, well what the hell are you waiting for? Go read part I and then come back here. Look I will even wait for you… done yet? How about now? Close enough? Like what psychopath reads a part II first anyway? What is wrong with you people? Finished? Okay, back to our regularly scheduled column.

After our morning meeting concludes I begin sweeping and hosing down the outside of the building for the first hour or so of my shift.

Just as my time outside is reaching its end, I see from the corner of my eye one of the sweeter tenants of the building coming back from walking her grandchildren to school.

Ruth was her name.

As Ruth and I trade our “hello’s” I begin to ask about Ruth’s grandchildren which immediately brought a smile to her face. (Sidebar if you ever want to get on a grandparent’s good side just mention their grandchildren. They eat that stuff up every time.)

We make our way inside and I hold the door open for Ruth, the first time I ever held the door for any tenant. I will never forget what followed.

Ruth cracks another smile before saying bluntly “your upper management is very stupid! Anyone with half a brain realizes you need to be at the front desk and not cleaning the building.”

This was said in the lobby of the building with the concierge and property manager both present for the compliment.

I ended up replacing that dude as the building’s morning concierge too. He still hates me to this day.

My first day ever as a concierge was a rather forgetful one too. To say I was nervous was an understatement. I remember my complete botch of the phone greeting the first time the phone rang during my inaugural shift.

“Good afternoon (it was morning) this is The Brian (?), Marc (the name of the building) speaking how may I assist you?”

Thank the lord that neither the superintendent nor property manager was not present for that debacle. Feeling so embarrassed, I abruptly hung up the phone and hid in the package room in hopes of never answering a phone call again.

One of the building’s handymen, who we called Castro, noticed the front desk empty and quickly found me. I told him about my phone screw up and he busted out in laughter.

“That’s it? I thought you broke a tenants package or something,” Castro said amidst all the chuckles with his slight accent. His smile seemingly going from ear to ear. The next thing he uttered has stood with me until this day.

“For a young kid like you, this job should just a pitstop in your journey to your career. Trust me you do not want to open doors and take directions from ungrateful S.O.Bs the rest of your life,” said Castro.

It was at this moment that I knew I had to go back to school.

I used this building to hone my craft as a doorman/concierge and I did. When the opportunity arose to take a position at the building I currently work at, I jumped at it. Some tenants even brought me gifts on my last day.

The greatest part of my building now is that it is a very small one, in terms of a residential building, meaning there is a substantial amount of downtime.

At first, I thought this was great as I had recently bought a Nintendo Switch and could pretty much get paid to game, eat your heart out professional e-sports gamers. And yeah while it was fun to go on quite the odd adventure with Mario in Super Mario Odyssey and explore Hyrule as Link like never before in The Legend Of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the words of Castro would ring in my head as the months went on.

The year the Nintendo Switch released, 2017, was also the year that New York State approved free tuition for two and four-year college education.

After one too many times of opening the door for some ungrateful bitch, who is an “aspiring Instagram model” yet fucking a man at least twice her age for the bag, and not evening having the decency to say so much as “thank you,” I knew enough was enough.

I got on the phone with Mercy College and along with paying them the over 4,000 dollar balance I still owed them, I reapplied. I got accepted, obviously.

Now to get paid to study and do assignments rather than playing video games.

Never was one for school either. Even thought college was pointless at one point, but look at me now. A senior… somehow. Part of my school’s newspaper, where if you ever asked me if I was going to be a part of my school’s paper I probably would have laughed in your face, and can say that I am finally making progress in my life.

I would like to thank everyone. Ruth, Castro, aspiring IG model, even Greg. All of you have shown me the value of something important. That being to keep striving. I have worked and seen too many doormen/concierge get complacent. Yeah, the benefits and the 19-22 bucks an hour we make sounds tempting, but it fails in comparison to chasing your dreams. Had I never chased mine, ConciUrge: Tales of an NYC Doorman would have never come to be.