There was a small drama unfolding this week beneath the rain-swept city. I first spotted this on Thursday morning, walking through the Rockefeller Center Concourse to escape the biblical flood. In the corridor that passes beneath Sixth Avenue a mop-weilding custodian was desperately trying to mop up the water that had been tracked in by the thousands of people hurrying past. He looked a little like an annoyed Goerge Carlin. He seemed to think that people should avoid walking on the part of the floor he had just mopped. But given the number of people passing through that passageway, he may as well have been raging against the tide. As I passed him, he had mounted the short set of stairs in a wide stance, mopping with broad arm-strokes, trying to take up as much space as possible to keep people from passing him -- and still people climbed past his swinging mop-pole... pissing him off mightily.

I kept walking and forgot all about it.

Yesterday I passed through that very same spot -- and there he was again! Still mopping, still annoyed. This time he brought several of those plastice "Wet Floor" signs that you set on the floor to keep people away. But even that was totally ineffectual: people walked right between the signs and past the infuriated worker.

I wondered when the rain would stop (today, turns out) and further wondered what steps Janitor-in-a-Huff would take next to keep people from trampling his handiwork. Police tape? Barbed wire? Proximity mines?

I loved this story about cheap umbrellas -- reminds me of being on the F train one day in the eaqrly 1980s, coming home from school on a rainy day. A old black man walked through the cars holding a full shopping bag, slowly announcing to passengers:

"Umbrellas... Three dollars and no tax. Because, it's raining, outside..."