The CEO's Bathrobe

Close encounters with banking royalty

One of the joys of working for magazines was the late start. Generally you were expected to turn up for work around ten o'clock. Swimming had made me an early riser, so this was a perfect setup for someone leading a double life as an editor at a science and technology publication and a writer of ridiculous stories. I'd wake up early, drink too much coffee, work on my fiction for three hours, then hustle to work.

I wrote the first draft of Fish, my first children's book, recently revised and retitled Sea of Gold, along with a really strange meta-novel about Bill O'Reilly, James Patterson, and a version of me. My talented Popular Science colleague Neil Russo created a sweet title logo in exchange for beers...

...but the book was never published.

Now back to the bathrobe.

Typically I wrote at my sister's old dining room table in my apartment, staring out the window at a brick wall. So when my wife - we weren't married yet - called me early one morning to let me know there was an empty suite at the St. Regis Hotel that I could work in for the morning, I grabbed my laptop, hustled to the subway, and got there as fast as I could.

The St. Regis is a very, very fancy hotel in midtown Manhattan. It's special in my family because my maternal grandfather, Maurice Reidy, once owned a wine and liquor store in the lobby.

My wife had access to the room in question because she was working as an event planner for Morgan Stanley, a major investment bank, and they were hosting a conference at the hotel. They'd reserved the suite in case any executives wanted to have a private meeting. But no one was actually using the room, and it was the last day of the conference, so she gave me a key.

(Also, the on-site event planner at the St. Regis went to my high school, where he was a notorious brawler who liked to fight multiple people at one time. How he ended up organizing conferences at a high-end hotel that has high-tea every afternoon I do not know.)

When I arrived, I still had two hours to spare before I needed to get to Popular Science, so I set myself up at one of the desks, only to realize I was perilously short on coffee.

Order some? Of course I did, and it arrived on a cart in a beautiful silver carafe along with three of that day’s newspapers, freshly folded and untouched.

My novel could wait.

I began drinking coffee and reading the papers, but something was off. Why were my shoes still on? This was a clear sign that I wasn’t truly embracing the experience. There was a beautiful, monogrammed bathrobe hanging on the back of the door to the marble bathroom. I kicked off my shoes and blazer, which was tweed and had patches, slipped into its terrycloth embrace, and reclined on the couch with my coffee and the news.

The phone rang.

How rude! But I answered anyway, and my wife was on the line, in a panic.

-Are you in the room?

-Yes, it's wonderful. The roast of the coffee is a little light, but-

-Get out!

-What? Why?

-The CEO is on his way up!

My wife liked her job. I clearly liked my wife's job. And I understood that if the CEO of Morgan Stanley stepped through the door and found me there in a bathrobe, drinking coffee and reading his newspapers, she might not have that job anymore. At the time, I looked like this:

Not a banker, clearly. And this was a good day. Normally my hair was longer and more disheveled. So I threw the robe in a closet, pulled on my Blundstones and tweed, grabbed my bag, tucked the papers under my arm, and pushed the coffee cart out into the hall. I don't know if I've ever moved that fast. I slipped into an elevator just as I heard the adjacent one opening, and important people talking inside.

Although I did work at Merrill Lynch as an analyst one summer in college, wearing that bathrobe is probably as close as I ever came to being a banker.

What does this have to do with robots and AI? Nothing! But I'm talking about both on Monday at 6:30 at WBUR's CitySpace, with my colleague and MIT AI expert Daniela Rus. If you’re in Boston, stop by! Grab a ticket here:

How about pirates? Well, I guess this story does relate to pirates, since I was working on the first draft of Fish at the time. And now the sequel to that book is coming out on Tuesday. Twenty years after I donned the CEO's bathrobe.

The lesson, kids: Always accept an invite to a high-end suite, especially if there's coffee, and don't hesitate to really settle into the moment, even if it's fleeting.

You can always ditch the robe and run.

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