Variety is the Spice of Life

It’s nice to work in a busy office building where our office isn’t the only one there.

My old job was in an office park that was, at the time, being refurbished to bring in new tenants. We rarely ventured into the other buildings except for the time we went to scope out the koi pond/Japanese style water-garden in the atrium of one of the buildings that our CEO felt was very necessary to entice tenants. Personally, I thought the whole atrium smelled like fish and not the good and yummy grilled-with-lemon-and-rosemary type of fish smell but, rather, the type of smell that comes from having a badly ventilated area with a fish pond in it. It was not pleasant.

Anyway, that was as much interaction as we had with other companies there. That is to say…none. It was pretty boring to see only the people you had to work with every day without the hope of running into anyone interesting that I didn’t know. There was hope at times. Our CEO also thought that clearing the area around a forgotten pond that was attached to the office park would make it a very social area while also making it appealing to would-be tenants. Of course, the reality of that was that the pond was unearthed for a while but lack of maintenance made the walking path around in impassable after a few months. Also, said pond was really just a rather large, muddy body of water. There was a little deck built to extend over it but only in the spring/fall was it appealing to stand on because otherwise you’d a) be bitten to within an inch of your life by hungry mosquitoes that used the pond as their spawning ground or b) be subjected to the smell of the pond which was not terribly pleasant.

I’m not bitter about it. The money for these renovations came from a different budget than that which funded my old company. It just seemed as though this money could have been put to better use. It was the same budget that funded the building we moved into that hosted The Most Optimistic Bathroom in the World and forbade us to complain about anything in this ‘perfect’ building for fear of getting fired.

It’s just nice to work in a building in which you don’t feel it necessary to occasionally drop to your knees in front of the CEO, splay on the floor and say “Thank you, oh Spanky for this beautiful building!”

Instead, I get to go to work in a building that has a bathroom that’s unadorned by anything. We can get things fixed by simply calling down to the property management office without feeling ike we might in trouble because it might be considered a ‘complaint.’

Also, it’s just nice to be in a place where I don’t know everyone in my building.

This makes life interesting. Sadly, book lady was fired from her job so I haven’t seen her in a while. Apparently, she was not the most pleasant HR lady in the world and was relieved of her position. I wish her well and hope she finds a new job where she has no pesky stairs to have to navigate while reading. At least now I don’t have to worry about her falling.

Our office is actually on a floor that has two other companies on it. It’s quite nice because one of the companies is large and there’s a plethora of people to watch. Also, our branch administrator knows everyone so all I have to do is say “who’s that?” and I can get a short biography of them.

What’s nice is that the office across from us is IT related and there are a nice lot of men who work there. This may not sound like a big deal but as a Singleton who’s been working in an office where the only men are the ones you work with and there’s no one particularly eligible or interesting, this is a very big deal.

It’s not that I’m expecting to meet Mr. Right but it’s just nice to look if that makes sense. The fact that our branch administrator is also a single woman makes it more fun because we can have little sessions where we just watch to see who passes by the clear glass doors of our office and wait for the elevator which, conveniently, is located right outside our office door.

It just makes the day more interesting. I’ve learned that the older gentlemen who dresses well is actually British and he flies home to the UK every other week to see his family who still live there. I’ve learned that the crabby little man who I see often and who always buttons his coat wrong is actually a developer that my old company interviewed for a job but didn’t hire him. I’ve learned that Book lady was actually Bad HR Lady who treated everyone rudely, smoked like a chimney and read her book so she didn’t have to acknowledge anyone. This is ironic for a human resources person, I find.

I’ve learned that the company next to us does market research and occasionally they get samples of products they don’t want so they give them to us. We currently have a large supply of off-brand mayonnaise in the office that has been here a while because no one wants it.

In short, it’s fun to work in my building. It’s as unpredictable as my work day- I never know how busy I’ll be when I walk in the door. I like life like this- it’s fun to be completely swamped on day and then have a day where the phone is quiet, no one returns email and I have to find new resources to find resumes.

It’s as unpredictable as the conversations we have in our office and the impromptu gatherings we have at the front desk in which we find something to Google or in which we take a brief Cosmo quiz.

It just makes life fun when it’s not the same old thing every day. I kind of love that.

Happy Thursday!

No Point Crying Over Spilled Tea....

I'm hoping today isn't going to be one of those days. I've already spilled my tea while I was driving down my nice newish white sweater I put on this morning. I've used soap and water to get rid of the worst of it but there are still yellowish patches that I'm hoping won't be too visible unless people know they're there.

Also, I had a bad moment while driving and I don't think it was my fault. It was a four-way stop and it was one of those slightly awkward moments when you get there almost the same time as another car. There's a moment of waiting while you both figure out who's going to go. Since it wasn't terribly light out there, it wasn't possible to do the universal wave of 'you go ahead' and have the other driver see it. So, deciding to take the lead, I started to go. Then, the other driver started to go. As we both moved, I thought, "oh, he's going straight, anyway" because there was no turn signal. Since I was also going straight, it didn't seem to really matter who went first. Except it seems that the other driver wasn't going straight, he was going to turn. Only as he pulled forward to the middle of the intersection did he put on his turn signal and then proceed to honk and give me the finger. I'm very sorry but where I learned to drive, the turn signal is intended to indicate that you're turning. If it's not on, how am I supposed to know where another driver is going? Since I'm sadly not psychic, I can't predict these things.

Then, when I get in, I see there are doughnuts in the conference room. I have a feeling this is to accompany our benefits enrollment session that's scheduled bright and early at 9 a.m. today. I wish I was a doughnut person but I'm not. I just don't get excited about doughnuts. My taste buds tend to veer towards savory and salty, not so much the sweet. Also, I find, if I do partake in the morning doughnut ritual, I end up wishing I hadn't because even though I was hungry, that's an awful lot of fat and calories that I just wasted on something I don't like that much anyway.

Still, I do appreciate the effort of our president to sweeten up the enrollments session. I'm not big on these. Working for a small company is very different from working in a the large university environment because it's harder to find affordable benefit packages. So far, this year, I've paid a lot of out-of-pocket costs because our insurance had a fairly high deductible. We were told yesterday that the deductible for the new plan would be a little higher. I'm trying to be excited and hope that it has better coverage but the idea of a higher deductible is a little worrisome.

Yesterday, during our benefits meeting, we also got a very nice pep talk from our CEO about our fantastic new office space to which we'll be moving next week. Maybe. No one quite knows when we'll actually be able to move in; at the very latest, it'll be the Monday following Thanksgiving. I didn't mind this until I found out yesterday that my plans for what I do when I had to work at home were foiled because they're going to be taking down the servers on which I access almost 98% of my workload. So, now I have to find out what, actually, I should be doing when I work from home since I adamently refuse to waste any of my precious remaining PTO days because my company forgot to tell me that they hadn't planned very well.

Still, according to our CEO, our new building is going to be spectacular. She's spared no expense. We will have a colour scheme matching our product suite which, for your information, is purple, a turquoise blue, a butterscotch yellow and red. The mental picture of that colour combination is probably much harsher in my mind than it'll be in reality....right? Even our countertops in our kitchen are speckled with those colours.

Also, we're going to have a workout room with a Wii, a Foosball table and bathrooms with nice showers. Also, the bathroom stalls are floor-to-ceiling for privacy. We may even get a yoga instructor to come and teach classes!

Now, I want to be a bright glow of sunshiny excitement about this. However, one thing I've learned from my company is if you're in the office, you need to be working. If you take time out to do something like, oh, go to lunch, you make up the time by working later. So, I'm having a hard time believing that our President is going to completely change and let us go play a rousing game of Foosball during work hours on a regular basis or that he's going to let us go take a break to run on the treadmill and shower. No, I think it's more likely that we're going to have to stay late to make up any fun time we spend at work.

Now, call me crazy and I know this is because I'm not experiencing 100% job satisfaction but, at the end of the day, I want to go home. I do not want to go play Wii with my coworkers. I do not want to do yoga with them. I want to go home. It's not that I don't like my coworkers. I do. It's just that I'd rather be home, doing something I actually want to do like writing, watching TV, making dinner. We're a company with about 22 employees who actually work in the office and not working remotely. By any standards, that's small. Our new building is the type of place you'd expect from Google, Microsoft....big companies that can afford to rotate work breaks and let people decompress at work. We're too small to really be able to do that.

I'm being negative and I know this. I, for one, like the idea of having a meeting while playing Foosball or running on the treadmill. Yet that means you have to find someone else who is capable of talking work while doing something else: Multitasking. Not everyone likes to do that. Still, on bad days, a game of Foosball is quite therapeutic. I like to play dirty.

Now that I'm thinking about it, maybe it's not such a good idea to have meetings while playing Foosball.

Still, I can't wait to see the new building. It's something to see, according to our CEO. She likes it so much, she's literally getting them to build her an apartment on the first floor so that when she comes in to visit (she's based in California), she has somewhere to stay. You might remember that my CEO likes some, uh, noisy extracurricular activities, things that involve a little spanking and squealing. I can't help but wonder if she's going to invite her boyfriend to her new place during work hours. That might be...entertaining.

I work in an odd place. I am incredibly lucky to work for a company that is trying so hard to make us happy and I really, really wish I could stop seeing the glass as half-empty. I try to be a half-full person mostly but there are times when that pesky sense of rational reality kicks in and says, do we really need custom-made bathroom dividers? Can't we, you know, use that money to increase the wages of the people who are going to paying a lot more to get to work because they now have to commute?

But, for now, I have our benefits enrollment to look forward to and the doughnuts that lie ahead. As long as I don't spill the doughnut on my shirt, if I decide to eat one, my day will already be better. Again, it's the small things in life., right?

Happy Tuesday!