a new office to call home

We have spent the past 3 days moving our office one floor up to a new space—a space actually large enough to accommodate our numbers, meaning we no longer have to sit on top of one another. A joy indeed.

My sense of spatial relationships feels out of whack. I automatically turn left out of the elevator, then have to stop myself and go back to the right—looking and feeling like a bit of a moron. This is assuming I have actually remembered to go straight to the fourth floor, rather than auto-piloting to the third, then having to take the stairs up a floor.

The bathrooms on this floor are in the exact same place and are identical to those downstairs except they have smaller toilets. Not weird small, just smaller than I'm used to, and they suffer in the comparison, seeming to be made for midgets. Also annoyingly, the soap dispensers are to the left of the sink, rather than the right, as they are downstairs. And when my right hand automatically reaches up to get soap, it just meets with air. My rhythms are disjointed; my motor memory misdirects me.

As the officially designated "creative person" in the office, I have had the "fun" job of designing the interiors. This has proved to be less about design and more about continual and very careful diplomacy. Gaining consensus on paint color was no small feat. Approving artwork for the walls may prove impossible.

We did a lot of the work ourselves. We laid the laminate flooring, painted the accent color, and moved the furniture upstairs with one dolly and a fleet of rolling office chairs. Our predominantly male office, the dears, seemed motivated by an unfocused brute strength whose primary aim was to dump all the stuff onto the floor of the new space in as short a span of time as humanly possible. I scurried along behind, touching up the dings in the fresh paint and attempting to impose some order on the chaos.

Office morale, on the whole, survived the move remarkably well. The comradery of the physical labor and the general contentment with the new space outweighed (if only slightly) the frustrations and inconveniences endured. Civility was only abandoned in the brief but mad scramble to claim desks. I got a quiet corner through cunning and carefully veiled but nonetheless manipulative suggestions. To my dismay, I am becoming fairly proficient at the nuances of office politics.