High-tech Zzzzz's

It was 2 o'clock in the middle of the workday, and I was snoozing. Or rather, I was reclining in a space-age pod on the 24th floor of the Empire State Building, fretting over the fact that I was awake.

For the past few weeks, napping pods have been all over television and newspapers in New York. MetroNaps, the company that created them, opened this first location in May, and it didn't take long for the futuristic capsules to catch the media's eye. According to the MetroNaps Web site, which bears the alarmingly Orwellian catchphrase "Welcome to the future of workforce productivity," MetroNaps "was born from the realization that many employees spend significant amounts of their day dozing at their desk or catching powernaps in odd places." With its methods and its contraptions researched at Carnegie Mellon University, MetroNaps aims to rectify the scourge of office lethargy by becoming "the premier provider of professional nap centers in the United States," offering overtaxed drones 20-minute naps for 14 bucks a pop.

Now, I have had co-workers who napped in "odd places." The last publication I worked for was quartered in a decrepit New York townhouse; the carpet practically hopped with mites, and unidentifiable secretions occasionally oozed from the walls. The building's little infestations made safe sleeping zones hard to come by, but my colleagues persevered: They napped on a crusty couch in the boss's office, the untended and dusty top landing of a staircase, under their own rusty desks. But I can say with confidence that not one of those revolting locations was as "odd" as the MetroNaps facility.

After seven years in New York, I had never been to the Empire State Building. I entered with my eyes skyward, gawping at the familiar spire and intricate window-work on the outside, and then at the marble of the inside lobby. I took the elevator to the 24th floor, snuffling up the comfortable steam-and-lead-paint smell of prewar Manhattan buildings, and ambled past old-fashioned glass office doors until -- just adjacent to Schall & Ashenfarb, certified public accountants -- I found MetroNaps. It was then that I left the dank familiarity of the 20th century and entered a Robert Heinlein novel. As soon as I was through the door, the light and ordinary sounds of the hallway disappeared; MetroNaps is kept dark and filled with a very loud whooshing sound. At a reception desk facing the door, a wildly friendly man, MetroNaps co-founder Christopher Lindholst, whispered, "Welcome to MetroNaps!" He gestured past the Ikea-style shelves that separated the check-in area from the much larger napping pen. That's when I saw them: eight egg-shaped pods, white and subtly illuminated, so that they seemed to glow in the dark room.

There isn't space to list all the Sci-Fi Channel analogies that began to crowd my head, but I know that Barbarella's Orgasmatron was edging out the black-oil alien-virus labs from "The X-Files" when Lindholst led me to one of the pods and tucked me in. It was really just an airplane seat-cum-La-Z-Boy, covered with some sort of slate-blue plastic stuff that was so soft and chilly to the touch that I actually checked to see if it was emanating cool air. It wasn't, but it still felt surreally light. The top half of the chair was covered by the naturally lit fiberglass dome -- imagine one of those beauty-parlor hair dryers enlarged 30 times. A lever controlled the degree to which the chair reclined, and a headphone sat on one of the contraption's arms, waiting to pump ambient music through my sleeping brain. A soft synthetic blanket covered me. All I had to do when I was ready to begin my 20-minute timed nap, Lindholst instructed, was hit a light switch.

For the past few weeks, napping pods have been all over television and newspapers in New York. MetroNaps, the company that created them, opened this first location in May, and it didn't take long for the futuristic capsules to catch the media's eye. According to the MetroNaps Web site, which bears the alarmingly Orwellian catchphrase "Welcome to the future of workforce productivity," MetroNaps "was born from the realization that many employees spend significant amounts of their day dozing at their desk or catching powernaps in odd places." With its methods and its contraptions researched at Carnegie Mellon University, MetroNaps aims to rectify the scourge of office lethargy by becoming "the premier provider of professional nap centers in the United States," offering overtaxed drones 20-minute naps for 14 bucks a pop.

Now, I have had co-workers who napped in "odd places." The last publication I worked for was quartered in a decrepit New York townhouse; the carpet practically hopped with mites, and unidentifiable secretions occasionally oozed from the walls. The building's little infestations made safe sleeping zones hard to come by, but my colleagues persevered: They napped on a crusty couch in the boss's office, the untended and dusty top landing of a staircase, under their own rusty desks. But I can say with confidence that not one of those revolting locations was as "odd" as the MetroNaps facility.

After seven years in New York, I had never been to the Empire State Building. I entered with my eyes skyward, gawping at the familiar spire and intricate window-work on the outside, and then at the marble of the inside lobby. I took the elevator to the 24th floor, snuffling up the comfortable steam-and-lead-paint smell of prewar Manhattan buildings, and ambled past old-fashioned glass office doors until -- just adjacent to Schall & Ashenfarb, certified public accountants -- I found MetroNaps. It was then that I left the dank familiarity of the 20th century and entered a Robert Heinlein novel. As soon as I was through the door, the light and ordinary sounds of the hallway disappeared; MetroNaps is kept dark and filled with a very loud whooshing sound. At a reception desk facing the door, a wildly friendly man, MetroNaps co-founder Christopher Lindholst, whispered, "Welcome to MetroNaps!" He gestured past the Ikea-style shelves that separated the check-in area from the much larger napping pen. That's when I saw them: eight egg-shaped pods, white and subtly illuminated, so that they seemed to glow in the dark room.

There isn't space to list all the Sci-Fi Channel analogies that began to crowd my head, but I know that Barbarella's Orgasmatron was edging out the black-oil alien-virus labs from "The X-Files" when Lindholst led me to one of the pods and tucked me in. It was really just an airplane seat-cum-La-Z-Boy, covered with some sort of slate-blue plastic stuff that was so soft and chilly to the touch that I actually checked to see if it was emanating cool air. It wasn't, but it still felt surreally light. The top half of the chair was covered by the naturally lit fiberglass dome -- imagine one of those beauty-parlor hair dryers enlarged 30 times. A lever controlled the degree to which the chair reclined, and a headphone sat on one of the contraption's arms, waiting to pump ambient music through my sleeping brain. A soft synthetic blanket covered me. All I had to do when I was ready to begin my 20-minute timed nap, Lindholst instructed, was hit a light switch.

For the past few weeks, napping pods have been all over television and newspapers in New York. MetroNaps, the company that created them, opened this first location in May, and it didn't take long for the futuristic capsules to catch the media's eye. According to the MetroNaps Web site, which bears the alarmingly Orwellian catchphrase "Welcome to the future of workforce productivity," MetroNaps "was born from the realization that many employees spend significant amounts of their day dozing at their desk or catching powernaps in odd places." With its methods and its contraptions researched at Carnegie Mellon University, MetroNaps aims to rectify the scourge of office lethargy by becoming "the premier provider of professional nap centers in the United States," offering overtaxed drones 20-minute naps for 14 bucks a pop.

Now, I have had co-workers who napped in "odd places." The last publication I worked for was quartered in a decrepit New York townhouse; the carpet practically hopped with mites, and unidentifiable secretions occasionally oozed from the walls. The building's little infestations made safe sleeping zones hard to come by, but my colleagues persevered: They napped on a crusty couch in the boss's office, the untended and dusty top landing of a staircase, under their own rusty desks. But I can say with confidence that not one of those revolting locations was as "odd" as the MetroNaps facility.

After seven years in New York, I had never been to the Empire State Building. I entered with my eyes skyward, gawping at the familiar spire and intricate window-work on the outside, and then at the marble of the inside lobby. I took the elevator to the 24th floor, snuffling up the comfortable steam-and-lead-paint smell of prewar Manhattan buildings, and ambled past old-fashioned glass office doors until -- just adjacent to Schall & Ashenfarb, certified public accountants -- I found MetroNaps. It was then that I left the dank familiarity of the 20th century and entered a Robert Heinlein novel. As soon as I was through the door, the light and ordinary sounds of the hallway disappeared; MetroNaps is kept dark and filled with a very loud whooshing sound. At a reception desk facing the door, a wildly friendly man, MetroNaps co-founder Christopher Lindholst, whispered, "Welcome to MetroNaps!" He gestured past the Ikea-style shelves that separated the check-in area from the much larger napping pen. That's when I saw them: eight egg-shaped pods, white and subtly illuminated, so that they seemed to glow in the dark room.

There isn't space to list all the Sci-Fi Channel analogies that began to crowd my head, but I know that Barbarella's Orgasmatron was edging out the black-oil alien-virus labs from "The X-Files" when Lindholst led me to one of the pods and tucked me in. It was really just an airplane seat-cum-La-Z-Boy, covered with some sort of slate-blue plastic stuff that was so soft and chilly to the touch that I actually checked to see if it was emanating cool air. It wasn't, but it still felt surreally light. The top half of the chair was covered by the naturally lit fiberglass dome -- imagine one of those beauty-parlor hair dryers enlarged 30 times. A lever controlled the degree to which the chair reclined, and a headphone sat on one of the contraption's arms, waiting to pump ambient music through my sleeping brain. A soft synthetic blanket covered me. All I had to do when I was ready to begin my 20-minute timed nap, Lindholst instructed, was hit a light switch.

Before I let the clock begin its tick, I sat up and tried to angle myself out of the pod, craning my neck to see if anyone else was dozing around me. I could not tell, no matter how hard I looked, whether the other pods were occupied. The whooshing sound, which I realized was identical to the engine and wind background noise on a plane, was so loud that I didn't think I could hear a snore or yawn, let alone a rustle of blanket from my neighboring pods. Several people who'd heard I'd be MetroNapping had asked me the same question: Can you have sex in the pods? Yes, I concluded, provided that you kept the moaning down and cut some sort of deal with the pod monitor.

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