A few of you have asked what I'm actually DOING. So here's a story I wrote:

Frank Ianno, president of DesignCore, a Brooklyn-based construction company, is having lunch. But there is no pause.

Ianno is sitting at his desk, which curves around from a window hatch on his right to the rest of the room where there are two chairs and a conference table. The telephone on his desk doesn’t stop ringing and a non-stop procession of faces appears at the hatch, a stream of questions which only he can answer.

Ianno’s lunch is a heap of French fries and a succession of burgers which he pulls from their foil wrappings. He pecks at the fries and nibbles on the burgers between phone calls and exclamations.

“Thank you, almighty one!” Ianno yells through the window to one of his employees, blowing a kiss. “I’m having a hard time in Bay Ridge, I’ve got to get Archie over there,” he says into the phone. “Randy is that you? What is your exact location?” he asks into a two-way radio that he pulls from a drawer.

“That is one pain-in-the-neck-phone,” Ianno says, as things settle down for a moment.

DesignCore is one of the two halves of Janton Industries, a family-owned company that specialises in building interiors for banks and stores. Ianno manages DesignCore, which makes the fixtures, and Salvatore Trento, his brother-in-law, runs Janton, the construction and maintenance end of the operation.

Ianno’s office occupies a corner of the second floor of Janton’s 300 000 square foot headquarters on the Brooklyn waterfront in Sunset Park. Light pours in through the huge windows of the city-owned building that was derelict and dilapidated when Ianno and Trento agreed a 30-year lease for the property in 1994.

Now, after a refit that cost more than $2m, the two floors occupied by Janton are full of whirring machines and the air is full of sawdust as the company’s 60 employees turn out the hundreds of desks, signs, teller stations and bullet-proof partitions that fill the New York branches of such banks as Banco Popular, Carver Federal and Citibank.

But despite such blue-chip clients and the durability of Janton (Ianno’s father, Joseph Ianno set up the company in 1958), there is no assured flow of contracts in the retail construction business where companies bid competitively for almost every fitting job, however small.

“There’s plenty of competition,” says Ianno, who is 43 and from Staten Island. “There’s a lot of guys out there who want to do the same jobs as us… You don’t just open the door and it all starts happening.”

But, even then, Ianno’s job does not finish with the constant task of winning bids and securing work. Just as the phone rings from the outside world and the window hatch brings him internal problems from DesignCore’s mechanics and carpenters, Ianno must look in two directions at once. Ianno must be Janus-faced.

“There’s a lot of pressure and there’s a lot of responsibility. You have to think of everyone all the time, everyone down to the guy that drives the truck and cleans the floor,” he says.

For Ianno, his responsibilities to his workforce are a vital part of the wider fabric of informal relationships that make factory work possible. No one at DesignCore has a full time contract. It is loyalty on both sides which holds together the workforce.

Ianno does his part. “Even when you’re not making money, you have to be loyal to the people who work here year round. Otherwise you risk them getting a job elsewhere and then you never see them again,” says Ianno, who has had some employees for 18 years.

And the employees do theirs. When the workload is high, Jedie Sacko, who has done finishing at DesignCore for 8 years, works from six in the morning to eight at night. “As long as you’re busy, you shouldn’t complain,” says Sacko, 35, a face mask around his neck.

But Ianno believes the relationships and skills that sustain his workplace are under threat. Unlike many businesses in 2003, Ianno has jobs to offer, but he can’t find people with enough skills to fill them. A problem he sees getting worse, not better.

“There’s not that many people working with their hands these days,” says Ianno, “People actually take factories for granted. Everyone wants their children to be professionals but there is a need for craftsmanship.”

But for now Ianno’s problems are more immediate. The phone is yapping again. The air conditioning has broken down at a Citibank branch on the Lower East Side and Ianno must despatch a team, armed with fans, to fix it.

As Ianno has been talking, a relative called “Cousin” walked into the office. Ianno rose and gave him a kiss. Cousin is older and has sat quietly, his stick leaning against his chair.

Finally, the phones fall silent again. Ianno’s fries are cold. Above his head a plastic poster shows Daffy Duck, his feet pedalling furiously in a cloud of flying papers.

“How you doing Couz? Hanging in there?” Asks Ianno, loudly.

Cousin wakes up. “Yeah?”

“I know the feeling.”