The Amazing Disappearing / Reappearing Gren
Currently, I’m sitting in my new, slightly smaller office, looking out the odd little window that opens into our much smaller warehouse and crunching on a baby carrot. “But wait,” you say. “Where have I been for the last two weeks? You can’t just dissapear like that and pop back in talking about windows.”
Well...I’ve been getting here. I’ve been fighting and struggling and gnashing my teeth so that I could sit here in relative relaxation and tell you that I have an odd little window in my office.
About two weeks ago, the president of the company I work for let me know that we’d be moving our corporate office. This I had already known. There was a loose contract on our building, but he wasn’t too concerned about the timing…so I wasn’t too concerned. I figured everything was under control. Then he mentioned casually on Wednesday, August 29th, that the new owners would be taking possession of the building we occupied on September 14th. Two weeks. Prep work done at that point…none. New location to move to…hadn’t even started looking. Panic level…stratospheric.
There’s a part of me that would love to go into excruciating detail on all the hurdles of the move, but two things prevent me. First, while we are now nestled into our new digs…the move isn’t really over. Folks want their voice mail and their printers to work. The warehouse evokes a 300 lb man squeezed into sweatpants designed for a man half his size…it demands some compressing and Tetrisizing. And there’s all that pesky work I was ignoring while focusing exclusively on the move…it didn’t magically disappear as I had hoped it would. Secondly, if my wife’s glossed-over eyes were any indication…the minute details of my battles with telecom, my attic crawls, my shelving assembly, and all the other skirmishes that made this such an ordeal are slightly less interesting in the retelling. I’ll spare you the nitty-gritty.
Besides, all that minutia were only tangentially related to the more important aspects. The new office itself tells nothing of my wife and daughter, left home to await the return of some semblance of normalcy. There were days in which I saw Norah for less than 20 minutes total. There were days when Moonshot nearly lost her mind from boredom and loneliness; unable to leave the house due to an illness Norah was fighting.
So, instead of telling all the details, I’d rather take these precious moments of remaining lunch break to thank a few people who really made a difference in all this.
Thanks to MoMa for coming up on short notice to keep my family company in my absence. Thanks to Panache for meeting Moonshot and Norah in Hannibal last week just to get them out of the house. Thanks to Jet, for shouldering the burden of our store with absolutely no help from his suddenly absent business partner. And a huge thanks to my wife who worked every single long hour I did…with no co-workers to keep her company.
12 comments:
You realize you're merely in the eye of the storm, and that the maelstrom will hit when you think all's well.
But probably not really. Because you did such a great job up front. Nah, nothing to worry about.
Glad to see you back here, and that you and your family made it through with an assist from Moma. Gotta love the Moma.
Glad to hear you're getting through all this - and hey, at least you have a good reason for absenteism : I've been sparse online mostly because I haven't been doing much interesting stuff to talk about lately... that's way lamer than relocating an entire office within two weeks. Is your company getting a longer lease now, or are you doing all of this for a quickly-found semi-temporary location?
"Tetrisizing" is so excellently slotted in, it's making the entire blog post worth reading by itself.
Ditto on the tetrisizing comment. I'm trying to picture the appropriate 300 lb man in small sweat pants, and now I realise that we have a whole bevy to chose from in our own construction supervision staff. Sitting all day in a pickup truck, barking orders and snacking will do that to a fella.
And thanks, I think, for sparing us the gory details. I can truly imagine them, having been involved in similar things before, but not to the degree that I feel you were.
Props out to Moonshot, MoMa, Jet, and of course your little Lutine. I'm sure she's happier to have her daddy back than we are.
They ask us to do miracles, don't they Gren? It's a good thing that companies like IBM are delivering 'magic pixie dust' to the market...where would IT professionals be without it...
Having what appears to be very similar position to yours, I can appreciate what must have been going through your mind when you were delivered the move orders, but in an effort to keep your blog @ a PG rating I will follow your example and leave those comments to the readers imagination.
Overall, it sounds like a "congratulations on a job well done" is in order...so, congratulations on a job well done.
Mark - You're right. We haven't moved our servers yet and chaos looms. We negotiated a deal to lease back our old server room from them for three months past close. Room enough for Trixalot to work on the servers and lockable to the outside world. Brilliant little bit of negotiation, I thought. Until the new owner let us know that his deffinition of leased server room was literally just the space the servers are sitting on. He planned to build his HVAC parts department in the rest of the room...around our servers racks. Um...no.
We're scrabbling to get the racks moved as quickly as possible.
Emilie - I'd count pregnant with a toddler running about as a good excuse for not finding the free time to keep content flowing.
And thanks...I do pride myself on my command of made-up words. ;)
Simon - So far, our warehouse is not barking orders at anyone. But other than that, you've got the mental image.
And yes, the Lutine was a trooper. She went through a short phase where she actually seemed a bit afraid of me when I came home, as if I had become a stranger. Just rubbed in how much time I was spending away and broke my heart. But I was able to spend vast quantities of time with her over the weekend and she seems to love me again. I much prefer it that way.
Louis - Thank you very much, good sir. I don't mind a bit of back patting. Especially since the bulk of the work done is not the sort of thing anyone ever notices. They only notice when it doesn't work and never really wonder what it took to make it work in the first place. I pride myself, for instance, on running beautiful wiring jobs (lessons from my Dad). I've taught my network admin most of my tricks and I say we do a nice job. But no one is going to walk up to our server rack and say, "My...what a stunningly arranged cable bundle that it." And that's a shame...cuz it really is a stuningly arranged cable bundle
All - And with that, I am off to frolic with my family. I am taking a much deserved half-day to catch some lunch down on the Loop and meander about the zoo.
Hey Gren...
I know that trick...I just disppeared and reappeared myself...
I am glad that we are both back! Hope that you are well!
Later!
Free zoo! Whoo-hoo!
Moksha, I know well the derision that is the perpetual burden of any company's IT department. When things work well it is taken for granted, and when things stop working, there is no umbrella large enough to ward off the rain of imprecations that get hurled your way. Unless you work for a guy who really 'gets' the importance and relative invisibility of what you do, it can be a largely thankless job.
So let me be one to thank you for doing a great and largely underappreciated job. Your cable bundles look fantastic!!
Glad you're back and settling in and that everyone survived. Grens are pretty tough, aren't they?
my husband is an IT guy....and i can surely relate to how moonshot probably felt. so sweet that you acknowledged that....
glad things are settling a little and hope the rest of the transition is a little smoother.
So, this has nothing to do with your post. Strange thought that you and my husband are both in the same sort of spot in the small office thing.
Yes, I know you were waiting for this... I was sad to have missed you however the thrill of having company in the daytime was excitement enough. Then I thought... I am sure I would have been a bit panicked to have some one claiming to be you, someone I don't even know the face of. Not sure really how convinced I would have been since I am a bit paranoid. It was fun though to mention to my husband that maybe you had come when he was at work to take advantage of me.
I will leave that for your readers to take how they want to and you left to explain. Oh the games I play. I can play them too
Moksha :o)
glad to see that the gren has emerged from digital slumber. I see the strange green matrix code starting to fall, quicker still, as the blogging spins back up to full speed.
...or maybe I am just sleep deprived...
I am humbled by your perfect and succinct thanks to your wife. this captures a few sentiments I also feel for my amazing wife who manages the house, dog, and baby in a splendid one-woman operation.
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