A Moving Story

Way back before I became a teacher and a blogger, I worked as a furniture installer. Modular office furniture, primarily. This meant that I spent a good deal of time in newer buildings and creating work spaces for employees who had yet to be hired. Or, in some instances, we were crafting new hives of cubicles for the drones to inhabit once they fled their old hive. New installations were the fun and magical part of the job. Unwrapping all that chrome and peeling the plastic sleeves off the office chairs that hadn't had their hydraulics diminished by thousands of absent-minded adjustments while waiting on hold. Wire management with no wires yet to be mismanaged. Panels whose fabric smelled every bit as clean as the fresh carpet upon which we trod. It was stirring.
But that wasn't the only part of the job. Living as we did in close proximity to a number of IBM satellite plants, I was often sent with a crew to repair or reassemble work stations that were being relocated in other offices or annexes or departments. What became clear to me very quickly was that IBM was happy to spend the money on not just us, the furniture installers, but an onsite crew of movers whose job was to roll boxes of personal effects and papers that needed to be taken out of the room before we came in to dismantle the desks, overheads, typing returns, lights and modesty panels. Once we had broken the furniture into its components, we would put them on four wheel dollies and roll them through the maze of hallways looking for the empty office into which we would reverse the process. Meanwhile, that crew of movers would head off to the snack bar, knowing that their next step was still some time in the future. They were in no rush. They understood this as part of the company culture. In the late eighties it was a simple enough assumption that IBM had this kind of money to burn. Why not? They were at the forefront of this computer revolution. Of course they could spare a few hundred dollars to have Bill's desk taken apart and moved to another corner of the building. I was pretty certain that I moved some of those same desks multiple times over the course of the three years I had the opportunity to be part of the migration. And all the while, those movers were hanging out, on the clock, in the snack bar. And the drone whose office we were navigating from one drab room to another was most certainly taking a personal day while all this mess got sorted out.
When I finished bolting the desk back together, we were off to the next one. Someone in housekeeping would give the movers a shout on their walkie talkie to let them know that it was safe to shove those boxes full of paperweights and rubber bands into their new home. Inevitably, it would be the following day that Mister or Missus Drone would reappear and begin the process of putting all those paper clips and sticky notes in just the right spot.
I knew it would be just a few weeks before we would be back. And the whole mess would start over again.
Job security.