Moving Day

I don't think I've mentioned this before, but my office hates offices.

No, really. The founders of my company eschew the entire office-with-a-door, private-line, cube-farm-with-concrete-colored-walls mindset. We work at tables, our personal cells are our office lines, our rooms are large (and sometimes loud) and we communicate really, really well. And the founders? They tend to work in the hallways, on tables, with their cells as their office lines, near the hubs of the projects. It really works.

I mention this because we've recently expanded into the rest of our building, and are in the process of breaking down MORE walls and eliminating MORE private offices. And at one point, the founders bought a set of cubes - low-walled, open cubes, roomy, but cubes nonetheless. I think they didn't like the decision, because it came time to expand out the operations, it was determined that These Cubes Must Go.

Simultaneously with this decision, the Lovely Bride has returned to tax preparation. She's spent the past few years working for a Big National Tax firm franchise, and as the years have passed they have been stressing their financial schemes as opposed to the art of preparing taxes. So she retired, only to join up a year later with a really small firm that is strong on tax ethics but is still getting its operation together, which includes needing good furniture for its offices.

So I mention the upcoming Death of the Cube Farm to the Lovely Bride, and she says yes, we could really use some of the stuff. And I ask the bosses, and they're cool, as long as everyone who wants to get some furnishings for private use gets first dibs. Friday morning the furniture team that had installed the cubes ripped everything down. And two of the artists took full cubes and one of the writers some desktops for his kids, along with two more of the artists. The rest had to go, and go before Monday, else it would end up in the dumpster.

So it fell to today to get a lot of cube furniture out of the office. With a weather forecast of snow. So at the crack of dawn we set out to borrow a truck from the Lovely Bride's Boss's brother, drive to Carpintino's to pick up her office accountant, office accountant's truck, office accountant's daughter, and office accountant's friend, and headed to my company to rescues the cube farm.

And a cube farm dismantled is a LOT bigger than you would think. Luckily I was able to dragoon two other guys at the company to help (I owe them pizzas, now), and the office accountant's husband and son were at the tax office to help us unload, which made a MASSIVE project just barely doable. Still we had to make a second run to pick up everything we could not fit in the first batch. So it took three pickup truck loads to move our chunk of the dead cubefarm to its new location.

All the while, all involved had to listen to me say that I neither knew nor cared what happened to it after it reached its destination. I had told the bosses it would be gone by Monday, and I wanted to keep that promise even if I had to grind the cubes to a fine powder and make it part of my complete breakfast.

So we offload the second collection, get everything squared away, and headed back to the house in midafternoon, after about 7 hours of hard work. I collapse in front of the tube, watching a History Channel special on ancient Egyptian weaponry. And as I am watching, I looked outside and saw that big, heavy flakes of snow awee starting to come down, only an hour after we had finished everything.

And I feel pretty darn good about myself, despite the aches and pains.

More later,