Because We Care

Corpworld is abuzz with moving these days. Shifting people means moving stuff.

Papers, phones, cables, computers and all manner of clerical detritus are being packed or unpacked everywhere you look. Corpworld has a plan for these sorts of things - and it would appear that it functions about as well as any large project that is divided against itself.

Case in point: personal storage. My current workstation has no storage of any kind. My prior desk had overhead bins, a closet, and two file drawers.
The fact that a worker is being moved from a place with storage to a place with no storage does not appear to have concerned anyone.

Not that I'm traumatized - but it did require adjustments. I've moved all my personal effects home - and the business related hardcopy is currently bivouacked in storage generously offered by my pod-mates.

I have no drawers for pens or papers - and one of my podmates appears to believe that the wastebasket I carried from my old desk belongs to them. This is a natural assumption - my podmate assumed that their new desk would be outfitted with one. I made the same assumption myself - only because I was relocated first - I had time to pilfer my old bin from my old desk.

I can deal - and I doubt my pod mate cares one way or another. They are merely making the easiest assumption. Correcting them would seem petty - would actually be petty. But it is yet another illustration of stuff falling through the cracks.

Today, for some reason - I have have a new phone on my desk. My old phone has vanished to parts unknown. My team leader has two phones now - new & old and is similarly curious why this is so. Both have dial tones, but only the old one responds to a call.

After lunch, my old phone returns. Now I have two phones as well. As no one else seems that curious - I shrug and assume the answer is in a forthcoming email.

Later in the day - I'm told I will be receiving a locker key. The past few days, I've watched maintenance folks moving and installing banks of lockers along the hallways - I guess there was a calculation that I would need storage after all. It just took a week for the machinery to deliver it.

My boss hands me my key and BD's as well. They're each in an envelope - complete with a machine lable identifying who they are for and where the locker may be found.

Yadda yadda - I'm back at the desk and it occurs to me I could lock up my coat. I have a nasty habit of leaving important stuff in my coat pockets and while outright theft seems a remote possibility - my coat and stuff is starting to leak out into the middle of the aisle.

For the first time I read the envelope my boss gave me.

Twice.

Then I walk over to BD's station. I'm dying to know if this is a typo.

BD, can you check your locker envelope? Mine looks like it's on the first floor.

BD and I are stationed on the third floor.

He checks and his locker is next to mine - wherever that is. The numbers are the inverse of where we are located, so I'm hoping that there's just been a mistake. We walk our entire floor, but our floor tops out well before it gets anywhere near our locker numbers.

We hit the elevator and walk the length of the building. Sure enough, the powers that be have assigned us storage space that is two floors away and at the opposite end of the building. We're expected to store our stuff there, then go to our desk.

It'll be easy, because we'll just reverse the process when we go home - go down two floors, walk the length of the building, then go up a flight of stairs to exit.

Really quite simple.

BD gave his key back right after he saw his locker.

I may wait until tomorrow.

And somewhere off on someone's project plan - a box is checked next to my name. Locker provided? Yes.