An Office Romance

A New Office

Like most love affairs, ours burned hot for a mere instant and then quickly, very quickly, turned cold. At the beginning of 2008 the staff at Chic Events was filled with excitement. Our company was growing and evolving and we needed a new space that would meet our needs. Much like the search for love, we began in earnest… asking friends, looking online only to be met with slim pickings. Most of the potential “suitors” we found were overly optimistic about what they had to offer us. We’d read ads of vaulted ceilings and exposed brick only to show up and find that “quaint, cute, and sweet” all meant miniscule and “upcoming neighborhood” meant that we might need to be jumped in to a gang in order to secure our safety.

After weeks of searching for Mr. Right, we settled for Mr. Right Now. We agreed to take this new space in “as-is” condition for an additional break on the rent and paid zero attention to things like outlets, plumbing or central air and heat. In fact, given the mess we ended up cleaning up (including, but not limited to a toilet that hadn’t been sanitized since the Reagan administration) I think it would have been better to have leased, say, a van…down by the river. But as it was, I started decorating the space in my mind without so much as an instant’s thought to where we would park or who our neighbors were. The neighbor in fact was a family-owned business that would start random screaming matches in Armenian throughout the day and night which were difficult to ignore through the paper-thin walls. We might have been ok with this if only we could understand what in the world they were so pissed off about!

Our new office space was large (too large, we soon realized) with amazingly high ceilings which made heating in the winter and cooling in the summer virtually impossible. The store-front that seemed so fantastic in the beginning soon became a nuisance as we were plagued with door-to-door salesman (yes they still exist), and people searching for the shoe store (it was next door). So at the end of the year, like any self-aware woman, we had to accept that this relationship just wasn’t going to make it. We sent a note to the landlord telling him, no it’s not you, it’s me… but you know what? It was HIM! It was HIM and his crappy office space! It was HIM with his shady electric and his rowdy tenants… and ok, I guess it was us a little because we should have been smarter about any relationship that we were locking ourselves into for a year.

So this time around we took our search very seriously. We made a list of must-haves and chanted them daily in a mantra… nice looking, good personality, dependable, someone we wouldn’t be embarrassed to introduce our parents to. And we found what we think is a great match with tons of potential. Like any new relationship, we’re excited by the possibilities but given our track record we’re staying cautiously optimistic.