I would be the last one to suggest a return to scrubbing clothes on washboards, cutting big lawns with human-powered push mowers or walking up to eighth-floor offices or apartments.

They knocked off early on Fridays and played massive games of Quake, the popular computer game, at the eighth-floor offices of a company called Random Walk Computing.

In an interview in his spacious eighth-floor office two blocks from the White House, Mr. Coia, 53, insisted that he knew then, and knows now, little about mobsters.

There, in an eighth-floor office marked Legal Counsel Inc., the 24-year-old former White House intern spent the next eight hours there pondering the most important decision of her young life.

"We're happy that the President was re-elected," Mr. Sweeney said in an interview in his eighth-floor office overlooking Lafayette Park and the White House.

V. Z. Lawton was signing papers in his eighth-floor office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development when the blast went off.

In a cramped eighth-floor office in downtown Washington, Robert F. Ellsworth leaned forward in his chair and spoke with a trace of anger.

We were sitting in his eighth-floor office on a sunny morning in August.

It is hard to square his optimism with conditions outside his eighth-floor office, with its bull's-eye view of the Parliament building.

The interior designer Thad Hayes started his career in the building in the 80's when he went to work for Bray-Schaible Design, whose eighth-floor office he now occupies.