First Day in the New Office

Today was our first day in the new office. Over the weekend we assembled desks and chairs, unpacked new monitors phones and hard drives, and set up the fridge and coffee maker; so today we were pretty much ready to hit the ground running.

We had a number of things scheduled:

• DSL installation
• Bottled water service installation
• Desk chair delivery (the guys are on conference room chairs at the moment)

Naturally we ran into a couple of hiccups. The DSL installation happened, but the technician did not bring the modems with him. As it turns out UPS came by to deliver the modems at 8:30am, but we didn’t arrive at the office until 9am. The note in the UPS comments was: “Office closed for the day”. We’ve put up a temporary sign with the office hours on the door now, hopefully UPS will deliver tomorrow while we’re there and we can get proper internet access up and running.¹

The bottled water service, thankfully, went without a hitch. We are using the same service as the Hive because we liked the water there.

The desk chairs did not show and a call to Staples got to the bottom of the issue. I’d ordered the chairs a while ago, and asked for delivery on the 21st. Apparently they got re-routed to a local store, but will now be couriered over tomorrow. Pretty top notch service from the phone rep there. She let me get off the phone, tracked down the chairs, and called me back with the resolution.

The next issue was the heat, or rather the lack thereof. The heater hadn’t worked since we started banging around last Friday, and our investigation of the furnace and the error light didn’t net a solution. For the first part of the day we were in hats and down jackets. With single digit temperatures outside and single pane windows, it was pretty brutal.

To celebrate the opening of the new office I gave the guys some Crowd Favorite fleece vests and gift certificates to a local coffee shop. Given the heating issues, they ended up being rather appropriate.

When we left to walk to lunch, the combination of us freezing in the office all morning and the frigid temperatures outside prompted us to hit the Wazee Supper Club instead of continuing one block to Dixon’s. We waiting for a minute and a half at the light to cross the street, then couldn’t take it anymore and decided to get inside.

Luckily an HVAC guy was able to come out around 2:15pm and fixed the problem – a filter that was way overdue for a change. *sigh* In our defense, the furnace is about 15 feet above the floor and we hadn’t looked at the proper side of it (as the filter panel blends in nicely with the duct work).

We received out first solicitor in the afternoon, I guess we need a “no solicitors” sign on the door as well.

We’ve got janitorial companies coming out tomorrow and Wednesday to give formal bids, and both of them support recycling. I’ve set up each desk with a paper recycling bin and the kitchen area has both a can/bottle recycling bin and the normal trash can for the office.

I think we’ll still be moving in for a little while. Among other things, we need shelves for the closet area to organize the supplies, chairs for the small meeting table I picked up tonight on Craig’s List, and whiteboards for the conference room.

It’s been fun so far, and it’s definitely an interesting learning experience.

1. We’re all sharing my EVDO modem over WiFi right now. [back]

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