In trying to describe my new job to someone yesterday, I told him that “it’s a lot like sociology, with less interesting questions.” The more I think about it, the more I think that pretty much sums it up.  Not necessarily in a bad way, mind you.  Let me explain.

Yesterday I spent several hours pulling hundreds of addresses out of a database, cleaning up the data for a batch geocoder, plotting these points on a map, then checking the mean distances of these points with another set of points I had already derived.

Thanks to all of this work, I can now tell you what proportion of our employees live within 1 mile of an Equinox Fitness Club.

See? Complex problem solving, multiple layers of analysis, less-than-riveting questions.

The thing is, I don’t particularly mind this. First, there is a difference between dull and unimportant.  The work I do has very real implications, and I know this.  But more importantly, the bulk of my time is not spent pondering the dullness of the question; it is spent finding answers. And as dull as many of these questions might seem compared to the Grand Questions of the World, they are never easy. The company dress code might be lax, the rhetoric might be hip and fun, but the methodology is muthafuckin’ rigorous. There will be no slacking. Guessing is okay, but only if it’s the “best unbiased estimate” you can muster. When it comes to data analysis, they mean business.

I shouldn’t be surprised that a company that made its fortunes building hypercomplex algorithms to beat the stock markets would be so quantitatively driven in other ways. What’s surprising is the degree to which this ethos permeates everything that happens there. Even the company’s interior aesthetic, as designed by architect Steven Holl, emphasizes the presence of order in what looks to be random. Over a staircase on my floor hangs a 9-foot-tall tapestry depicting pi to the nth decimal place. You cannot walk to the coffee maker and back without seeing something to remind you that there truly is order in the universe.

Astronomers look for this order in the stars. Geneticists find it in chromosomes. I search for it in the average employee’s mean proximity to high end health clubs. So what?

I had a job interview in Midtown recently. Dressed in proper interview apparel (I clean up fairly well, you know), I spilled off the too-crowded Q train at 42nd Street and into the beehive of morning commuters rushing through the station’s sweltering underground tunnels, emerging from the underground into the sea of tourists that is Times Square. Walking briskly through the crowd in my new, not-yet-broken-in dress shoes, I did my best to avoid collision with the throngs of wide-eyed out-of-towners ambling obliviously down Broadway. Darting onto 45th Street and into the who-knows-how-many-floor monolith of an office building, I breathed a sigh of relief to escape the chaos.

Most people who live in New York—the ones I know, anyway—loathe Midtown. We scoff at its overpriced, gimmicky eateries and grumble at the impenetrable crowds of tourists clogging the sidewalks. With proper motivation—a new exhibit at MoMa, or some fancy new restaurant, for instance—we might bite the bullet and brave the crowds, but for the most part, Midtown is something to be avoided. Midtown, we scoff, isn’t the “real” New York.

I have to admit that, after moving to New York, it did not take long for me to adopt this attitude. But in all fairness, it’s not exactly the kind of neighborhood you go to for… anything. Not the stuff of daily life, anyway. If you’re looking for an Everybody Loves Raymond coffee mug, Midtown is the place to be. Otherwise, you’re usually better off finding your goods and services elsewhere.

But this particular morning, as I sat in a conference room in the 30-somethingeth floor of this office building looking out over Times Square and the oversized advertisements for Broadway shows like Rent and Beauty and the Beast (last show July 29th!), I remembered what it was like to visit New York for the first time. I remembered how exciting it was to walk down Broadway, marveling at the gigantic ads and news tickers. For a minute, anyway, all my distaste for the neighborhood melted away and I actually got kind of nostalgic.

I first visited New York when I was 17, in August of 1994. The trip was a year-early graduation present from my uncle Brad. We stayed in Midtown and managed to do all the things a tourist is expected to do in our four day trip: World Trade Center, Times Square, Wall Street, a Broadway musical (Grease!), shopping in SoHo, and of course, the Statue of Liberty. We even managed to take a quick detour off Broadway to CBGB’s, which we found surprisingly lifeless and dumpy at noon on a weekday. (It was not until my next trip that I would discover that it was pretty much always dumpy, even when not lifeless.) We never strayed far off the first-time NYC tourist’s to-do list, but it didn’t matter.

On that trip, Midtown was New York to me, and it delivered all the glitz and excitement and bustle that I had imagined. As I sat in that office looking down at it all, it occurred to me that when I first fell in love with New York, I was falling in love with Midtown. In subsequent vacations and over my years living here, I have fallen in and out of love with many neighborhoods, and I’m always finding new reasons to love (and hate) them. But Midtown was where it started.

That morning, in the office of one of those big financial companies that are the reason so many of us dislike the area (the irony is not lost on me), a hint of that wonder and excitement came back to me. It was a nice reminder.