Everybody in the city has their own particular nightmares, specific to our strange and semi-dangerous environment. Intel Adam Pasick (our boss!), for example, lives in fear of getting doored by a cab when he’s speeding along the street on his bike. Intel Chris is convinced that one day he is going to accidentally sit in human poop. Intel Jessica is simply waiting for the day when she opens her cupboard and instead of finding endless half-full boxes of pasta, she will only find rats. And Intel Dan is just worried that one day, while riding in the back of a cab, he’s going to get murdered.
There are some fears that are shared by probably the majority of people here: That someone will push us onto the subway tracks while the train is coming, for example, or that our unnoticed apartment door won’t fully close, and someone will come in and rob us blind (and judge us for the low-budget bedroom items they discover in a bottom drawer). Or the old standard where we die alone in our apartment and nobody notices we’re gone until the hallway starts to smell like cheese. Person cheese.
One such fear of the latter category, which is shared by everyone on the Intel team, is that we’ll be walking down the street and suddenly, for no reason, an air conditioner will fall loose from its mooring and plummet down atop of us, squishing us like Wile E. Coyote under an anvil-shaped boulder. Seriously — have you seen the way people install those things? Many don’t know that you need to use window brackets when you put in a unit. In fact, it’s illegal not to. (Intel Nitasha went five entire years in the city without A/C because she was afraid of installing it improperly.)
There were no brackets on the unit that plummeted from the sixth floor of 65 Second Avenue yesterday. It fell from the window of Bruce Fuller’s apartment and, after smashing through the awning of WineBar, landed on the head of 67-year-old Vietnam vet Anthony Franzese. But there is a silver lining to this tale: Franzese did not die, and in fact, was found only to have minor injuries after being taken to Bellevue Hospital. And since he and Fuller, the AC unit’s owner, are friends, Fuller is taking care of Franzese’s Shih Tzu while he is incapacitated.
So take heart, nervous New Yorkers. If an air conditioner falls on your head from six stories up, you might not die! This guy didn’t.
But let’s be honest, most likely, you will.
