End of the Office

This week we've been transforming the office. The office was once envisioned as a game empire command center, the ultimate place to sit back and plan retail conquests and do the back office stuff associated with the store. Mostly it was where I paid the bills. As I've mentioned before, the epiphany struck me one day that offices were big, evil, time sucks that placed a barrier between me and the customers. They divided my time and location. I could either run the store or conduct store business, when both of those things are more efficient intertwined. When you have an office, paying bills, talking to vendors, filing papers are things you do on your time, rather than while on the clock, running the store. Going paperless and moving that part of the operation to the cash wrap area saves me many hours a month.

So what happens when you abandon an office? It becomes a garage. Nobody spends time there, so nobody is invested in making it look nice. Stuff piles up and you start pointing fingers until you realize that nobody is responsible for it. We even noticed rat droppings when we started cleaning, at which time I made the no food in the office pronouncement. We took on the office this week because we wanted to transform it into a more efficient storage center for taking in more liquidation product. This included buying a lot of new shelving, but it was mostly getting rid of stuff, especially the giant desk that had long been in the way.

The desk concept is obsolete for me. It includes things like drawers for collecting clutter and a flat surface to attract piles of junk. When we went to move it out, it wouldn't fit through the door. In our rush to get the store built, we had moved the desk in before we had fully built the walls and doorways. Now there was no way to remove it. A helpful customers went out to his truck and came bag with a grin on his face. He took out his aggressions on the hapless desk with a sledgehammer, reducing it to kindling in a just a few minutes. It was a final, symbolic end to the office concept.