Office Mates

Until very recently, the company I work for took up one and one-quarter floors of a 31-story skyscraper.

I worked on the floor that was entirely ours, which was near the top of the skyscraper.  My pal Heather worked five floors below on the partially-ours floor.  We made it work.

Currently, my floor is closed for renovations.

So, about six weeks ago, the company gave us all a stack of boxes, rented a couple giant dumpsters, and told us all to start cleaning out and packing.  We would be moving twenty floors down to a temporary office, and since they would be tearing down walls and stuff, we could leave nothing behind.

This, in and of itself, was a bit of a problem due to the nature of my job.  My boss refers to me jokingly as her ‘Chief of Staff’: I have to know at least a little bit about everything that’s going on, and handle all the details the boss doesn’t have time to handle.  It’s the kind of job that generates a lot of paperwork that you’ll probably never need to look at again, but that you can’t quite safely throw out yet on the off chance that you do.  But it’s also the kind of job that doesn’t generate a lot of spare time to go back and clean out said documents…so they keep piling up.

It’s ALSO the kind of job where, when you finally choose to leave it, your X weeks’ notice will never be enough time for you to both train your replacement and clean out your desk.  So when someone leaves it, they just kind of…bequeath their document hoard to their successor.  It’s what my predecessor did to me.

And it became clear, in the face of the hard deadline “your stuff MUST be entirely packed up by 5 PM Tuesday and you will not be permitted to re-enter this floor until March”, that the Handing Over of the Document Hoard was a tradition that had been honored by a long chain of Chiefs of Staff before me, stretching back at least 20 years through at least 4 different people, some of whom pre-dated even my boss at the company.  I was finding CD-ROMs of recordings of conference calls about laws that no longer exist; printouts of powerpoints from 1996 in Comic Sans; all of it shoved unceremoniously into the next person’s hands with a mumble of ‘here’, just as the goodbye-party-cupcakes were being passed around.

I’m still not sure how, but I managed to get all of it into either a dumpster, a shredder, or a box marked, “Store Until March”.

The temporary office is only half a floor, so we were all forewarned that it would be a pretty tight squeeze.  Rather than the slightly more open office plan our regular home had, the temporary location is a honeycomb of tiny, walled offices, and to fit us all, we would have to double up, two to an office.

The place is livable, but kind of…slightly worse than our real office in every way.  The overhead lights are overpoweringly bright, and most people in my division have opted to turn them off and bring in lamps.  Since we share the only set of bathrooms with several other companies, apparently this means that for some reason they have to be kept locked, and going to the bathroom means bringing both your keycard for our office door and the large key ring of bathroom keys they keep by the office entrance, like it’s a first grade bathroom pass.  There are no conference rooms large enough to fit my whole division, so every Monday for our weekly meeting we have to bring in seven or eight extra chairs and line then up against the back wall.

For the first few weeks, I was one of few people fortunate enough to have no office mate.  The downside of this is that people used the vacant desk to pile all the stuff they didn’t need immediately, but didn’t want to put in long term storage.  A couple weeks back, though, HR let me know that a new hire would be sharing my little office with me, so I redistributed as much of the stuff as I could, and the two boxes I couldn’t find a place for, I stacked in the corner against the load-bearing beam that takes up a big chunk of the back wall.  I put some plants on top of it.  If you squint enough, it kinda looks like a table.

The new hire is 22, and this is her first full-time job out of college.  She’s friendly and polite, a quick study, and takes copious notes.  We coexist well, but the Disney trainer in me frets a bit that she might not be having the best First Adult Job experience, conditions being what they are.

That’s why I worry about the lasting effects of what happened last week.

It was the new hire’s sixth day on the job.  We were both in the zone, working by lamplight.  She was studying up on state laws, I was editing a 40-page report.

The light filtering in from the hallway was suddenly darkened.

I looked up to see our HR guy, Joe, carrying a massive canvas, and I knew instantly what it was.

Many years ago, long before I, or even my boss, worked there yet, our board of directors decided to celebrate a milestone anniversary for our organization by hiring a painter and commissioning a painting that would embody ‘the spirit of our industry’ or something similar.

I don’t think anyone expected the artist to paint an actual spirit.

Actually, to me, there’s nothing too otherworldly about her.  I’ve always kind of thought she looks a bit like the woman who had my current job immediately before me, and there was nothing really occult about her expect her strong belief that juice cleanses were a good idea.

Anyway, the board didn’t like the first result, so they had it repainted, and they didn’t like the second result, so they had it repainted again.  I don’t know whether third time’s the charm and they were actually satisfied with the result, or if they were just tired of shelling out more money to fix the thing, but the end result is a 4-foot-by-6-foot canvas that looks, to me, like the artist’s sister-in-law posed wearing a dining room curtain and holding a globe.

I couldn’t say whether any of the higher-ups have any opinions about the painting either way, but I’ve always thought it was kinda creepy.  But it was Meaningful and Symbolic and great effort and expense had been invested in it, so it hung on the office wall.  And now, it seems, the renovations had finally progressed to the point where it had to be taken off the wall and stored somewhere.

“Joe,” I asked with some trepidation, “is that the creepy lady?”

Joe peered through the gloomy lamplight into our office.  “Got any room in there?” He joked.

At least, I thought he was joking.

“I dunno,” I joked back, gesturing around the cramped little office with its stacks of boxes, “it’s a little crowded in here.”

“Looks like there might be some space,” Joe said.

“Ehh, maybe,” I said, “but I’m not sure.”

“Is your desk right up against the wall?” Joe asked.

“… No?” I replied, perplexed.

Joe nodded satisfactorily and started maneuvering the painting through the doorway, and it dawned on me that he was serious.

I scooted out of the way, and Joe started carefully contorting himself between all the office furniture while hefting a giant painting over his head.  “… You mean… I’m getting the creepy lady?” I asked in disbelief.

The look on the new hire’s face clearly read “what is even happening right now?”

To add to the spectacle, the CEO and his assistant came crowding to the doorway.  “Ooh,” his assistant said, “you’re getting the scary painting?”

“Uh, Joe,” I asked uncertainly, “do you need help?”

“I always need help,” he joked (I think) as he placed the painting neatly–facing outward, much to my chagrin–against the back wall.  Stepping back to admire it for a moment, he then made a few slightly adjustments to center it more to his taste.

As the onlookers in the doorway began to disperse, Joe dusted off his hands and began to leave.

I stared at the painting, slightly overwhelmed.  “So… This is where she lives now?  Should we not touch her?  Can we decorate her for Christmas?” I joked.

“No pushpins,” Joe replied, completely serious, and then he disappeared back to HR.

The new hire looked at me, traumatized.

“Is this a joke?” She asked.

“I don’t think so, unfortunately,” I said, chuckling at the absurdity of it all.

“I feel like I’m being hazed right now,” she added as she settled uneasily back into her desk chair.

“Same,” I said, snapping a picture.  I had to show Heather.

I decided my coordinator needed to see it too, so I sent her a quick instant message.  “Got a second?  Could you come over?”

Seconds later, she walked in the door, plopped into the chair next to my desk, and said “what’s up?” Before she noticed the creepy lady and added “GAH!” We filled her in on what had just taken place.

“Why didn’t they just stash her in a conference room or something?”

“That was my question too,” I admitted.

“At least he could have turned her to face the wall,” the new hire said.

“What is she even supposed to be?” My coordinator asked.  I explained the whole backstory.  “She doesn’t look like the spirit of anything,” she said dubiously.  “She looks too normal to be a spirit.  She looks like her name should be Bernadette or something.”

We floated the idea of moving her from office to office as a prank, but I really don’t want to be responsible for accidentally destroying a very expensive painting that the board of directors commissioned.

As I was leaving that night, I nearly gave myself a heart attack when I glanced back into my dark, empty office and saw a shadowy figure along the back wall.

Apparently, while I was working from home the next day, Joe had a bout of remorse and came over to say that if we really didn’t want the painting, he’d find another place for it, but the new hire politely told him it was fine.  We both agree that it’s too much of a conversation piece now to put it anywhere else… But I think it’s gonna be a long four months until we move back to our real office.