movers.

The office move is this week. The shredding has continued, mostly done by the accountant with the rest of us assisting in shifts. She was even in here over the weekend with her kids, feeding more invoices and packing slips and expense reports into the hungry hungry shredder. I helped out on Monday, and there were four of us standing in a circle around the shredder. We made Enron jokes.

Last week, we were given boxes and told to pack up. I was amazed at how much crap I had, since I moved desks just a couple of years ago. But moving to a new spot in the same office is just a matter of dumping your drawers into a box, moving the box ten feet, then dumping the contents into a different drawer. This time, I actually bothered to look through each item and decide whether it was worth keeping.

Of course, my coworkers have it worse. Some of them have been with the company for twenty years, and they last changed offices in the mid-90s. In fact, one of them even found a piece of paper from the previous move, with information about their new address, the one we are now leaving. He decided to let that go. He was going through his desk, pulling out notebooks.

"I probably don't need this notebook from 2004, huh."

"My cut-off date is 2007."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, before that I didn't work here."

"Oh." He threw 2004 away.

After cleaning out my desk, I was left with stuff that I didn't want, so I started a little Goodwill bag (using a paper bag I'd saved from a trip to Dunkin Donuts, who knows when). Then I saw other people throwing things out that were definitely still useful, so I grabbed one of the packing boxes and wrote "GOODWILL or FREE" on it. I dumped the Dunkin bag in there and sent out an email letting everyone know. By today, we required a third Goodwill box. Someone had left a big stack of cassettes in there, so if you're looking for some Van Halen to play in your beater car, just let me know.

Today was the last day in the old office. Tonight, people will come and dismantle the cube farm so they can set it up again at the new place. Tomorrow, movers will pick up all these boxes and hopefully put them in the right cube, as designated by the stickers on the sides of each box. All our computers are to be put into the conference room and plugged into the internet so we developers can all work from home the next two or three days. The sales guys, the support team, and the accountant will all work in the conference room at one table.

This morning, there was a call for help, so I put away my Fortran project and went to pack up the kitchen. For the first cabinet, I faithfully boxed up everything, using packing peanuts to cushion the breakables. By the second cabinet, I asked someone if we were ever going to use these four vases again. During the third cabinet, I gave myself the authority to decide what to get rid of, and so went a basket, four plastic bowls, and three coffee grinders. I salvaged a canister for myself. I wish I'd taken this initiative before I packed up fifty coffee mugs. I packed up the three champagne flutes, though I can't imagine us using them. It must've been a different kind of company before 2007.