B O N D P H O N E.
Words and pictures by Chris Lamb.

No, for reals.

I work for a company called Pop&Co. based out of the Meat Packing District of Manhattan's West Side. We're on the fifth floor of an old warehouse-turned-office space with a view of the Hudson and lovely-from-a-distance New Jersey. I ride a freight elevator (that is also our lobby) every morning that's operated by a guy named Berman. The artwork in the elevator consists of two murals of racy postcards from distant lands, a shot of the Eiffel Tower taken from between a woman's legs, that sort of thing. This is how you spell "professional" when the name of the neighborhood you work in makes little boys and bartenders snigger.

There are about ten of us on full-time at Pop and a huge cast of freelancers coming and going. It's a tight operation, with little room for do-overs or mistakes. It's nice, though; you know the folks you work with and you know them well, and help is always a holler across the office away.

But anyway: My job, in addition to the catch-allness that comes with the words "production assistant," is to design games. I write the initial document, making everything work on paper before the client or the programmer sees it. Later, when we get into visuals, I sketch out the level designs themselves. It's intensive, insane work, and probably the most fun I've ever had while getting paid. Creative writing that pushes all my puzzle-solving buttons? Hell and yes, please. There are two games with me all over them, at the moment: one for a new show that I can't talk about, and one for Cartoon Network's Puffy Ami Yumi Show.

This isn't sounding very exciting at all, is it? Okay, try this: a couple of weeks after I started, we had new carpet put in the office. Carpet that is the greenest of green and the next best thing to astroturf you can have without being considered a fire hazard. Once the dust settles on a few things, we start designing holes so we can turn the office into a miniature golf course. The week after carpet came in, we had a party for a stuffed animal maker (Stuffer? Stuffist? Stuffinista?) that went into the wee hours, ending with me and the dude behind Pac Manhattan talking about We Love Katamari Damacy and City of Heroes and sneaking contraband smoke out the windows. I think it was those games, at least.

And today I sat quietly in a conference room on the forty-first floor of a building in the heart of Times Square, observing how Business Gets Done and watching the boats and smoke glide over the river.

There are worse jobs, y'know.