The Move

 

What can I say?  I and 18 of my employees relocated our office to another city 10 miles from our previous office.  We left an office complex of 12 buildings and thousands of employees to go to one, half-mile long building that looks like a bunker from the front and a warehouse from the back.  We were given a week’s notice of the move.  The past week has been incredibly stressful, but I knew in the end, everything would work out okay.  Of course there were a few issues with the computer network not working in some work stations, desk drawers with no keys, and a couple boxes ended up in the wrong cubicles, but all in all, the move went very smoothly.

I assigned one employee to act as a point person at our prior location to assist the movers with making sure everything that we wanted to bring with us was packed.  Naturally, a few things weren’t labeled, so there were calls back and forth – does so and so want to bring his chair (yes, of course), do we need the coat tree (no, there are numerous coat racks here), etc.  I had a few designated “traffic directors” at the new location armed with seating maps and placement diagrams for our cabinets and equipment.  Since the staff was asked to wait in the canteen until their boxes were delivered and their computers set up at their workstations, I asked a few more to set up a breakfast/snack and games station to keep everyone fed and happy while they waited.

That little label printer turned out to cause the most problems of anything in the whole move.  I mentioned how our agency has a support bureau that does the physical move, and an IT crew who takes care of the computers and a separate crew for phones, well there was one person whose sole job was to set up that label printer.  Apparently it needs a special network jack.  Not every desk has those jacks.  Then we couldn’t find the label printer.  We knew we hadn’t packed it in a box because we left it hooked to the jacks in its prior location, but it was labeled and we did a walk through to make sure everything went, so we knew someone had packed it.  Eventually we found it and of course it had to be moved to a different location than the one we originally designated.  The new location is better, so that worked out okay too.

By lunch time, everyone was at their desks and working on unpacking boxes.  We’ll eventually get the supply cabinets and bookshelves restocked.  I can feel the stress level going down little by little.  By next week, it will feel like we’ve been here all along.