"When I first started at Cartier, I had to sweep the workroom floor," Mr. Paris once told an interviewer.

But Pat McGovern, a spokeswoman for the Postal Service, said there was no policy discriminating against the use of Spanish on the "workroom floor" of the distribution center.

"You don't mind doing these things for people who appreciate it," he continued from his workroom floor, one in which rows of seamstresses busily pedal away at old Singers.

XXVI THE EIGHT CHAIRS, all rough-finished, sat in a line across the workroom floor.

With another deep breath, he took the low steps and entered the hall, stopping just before the workroom floor.

There are two workroom floors, a design floor and two showroom floors filled with bathroom vignettes of green glass tiles, replicas of Helena Rubinstein's minimalist medicine cabinet in stainless steel and marble (Urban Archaeology's best-selling item) and slate and marble floors to tempt TriBeCa's new royalty, the hedge fund managers.

He looks at the heap of dust on the workroom floor.

Nubara looks down at the pale paving stones of the workroom floor, then lifts his eyes to the Prophet, meeting the younger man's glance evenly.

Blanched in death, with a rising odor, a giant squid - one of the best-preserved examples of this rarely seen species - lay thawing on a plastic-sheathed workroom floor at the American Museum of Natural History last week.