The scene at Lehman

NYT reporter Michael Grynbaum describes what it was like today at Ground Zero. Clearly, it hasn't sunk in for many Lehman employees.

Some desks had already been cleaned out, a hive of screens gone dark above tabletops bereft of personal items. The foreign exchange trading floor, on the third floor of Lehman’s all-glass Seventh Avenue skyscraper, was only about two-thirds full. Empty pizza boxes sat stacked in one corner; suit jackets hung on hangers at the end of cubicles. Pairs of traders, their brows furrowed, whispered to one another at the ends of aisles. Some perused the bankruptcy papers that their superiors had filed just hours earlier.

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Many employees barely glanced at their monitors, ignoring the increasingly dire headlines in favor of small talk with glum neighbors. “I’ll have to figure something out before I run into money problems. What about you?” one man asked a colleague, who sat slumped in his chair, sneakers kicked up on a table. Packets of potato chips and a 12-pack of Aquafina water bottles sat untouched next to him. “What will you do then?” one woman asked another. “I guess, go back to school … ?” came the uncertain reply. Bottles of alcohol popped up on the equity trading floor around noon. A dark, squat bottle of Don Julio tequila shared desk space with a keyboard; two rows over, a glass container of 80-proof Monte Albon mezcal appeared only half full. Pizza arrived shortly afterward, two dozen boxes of flat square-cut slices that were quickly devoured.