Mido

I'm always talking about the Mido building where I work, so I thought I'd take a picture of it for you. It's an old, dilapidated structure. I'm in the old, beaten-up part of Gangnam. This particular district is called Daechi, and it's known for having plenty of language institutes and other cram schools. My company has several branch offices along this street:

There's the old girl.

Mido has three above-ground floors and one basement floor. The restaurants are pretty much all on the B1 level, with one exception: a sandwich-shop/café setup on the ground floor. The ground floor has a 7-Eleven (visible in the photo right at the building's corner), a bakery, a French-style patisserie that's not going to last much longer, assorted clothing stores, real-estate offices, stationery stores. There are also two cafés, neither of which serves anything other than extremely simple food. A few miscellaneous stores round out the first floor. I work on the second floor, dominated by a gym, a branch of Woori Bank, a cram school called Fineman, my own company (the Golden Goose), a skin clinic, a dentist's office, and a few other businesses on the other side of the gym. The third floor is weirdly esoteric: there's a taekwondojang for kids taking martial arts, a Chinese-medicine clinic, another Fineman office (with classrooms), some admin space, and little else. Oh, yeah: the basement has, along with restaurants, some clothing-repair shops, some sellers of Korean food products like soy sauce and dried this-and-that, an imported-goods store, an artisanal ddeok seller, and some fresh-produce sellers who subdivide into fruit vendors and vegetable purveyors.

All in all, Mido is a strange and old-school mix of shops and businesses. A phrase like "my office" is rather vague in this context: when I say "my office," am I talking about the entire building? The totality of my company's offices in the building? Or just the little room at the end of the hall (itself an "office") where I work? When I came to this company in 2015, I started off working in this building for a couple years; in 2017, our team moved to the Cheongshil building, then we moved again to the Classia building around 2019. Cheongshil is where my CEO has his office—the Dark Tower of Sauron from which stares the Flaming Eye. Mido, which I came back to, and where I've been since 2020, is the farthest building out: it's small and quiet, located away from the madding crowd, and while my particular little office has no windows, I appreciate the relative silence and privacy that come from working here.

So that's a little about where I work. Now track me down like a good stalker.