A lot of people don’t like change. In all the 20 or so years that I lived with my parents in our first house we never once changed the furniture around in the living room. It was all my mother’s fault. She just didn’t like to change things and when she was happy with something, then that was the way it would stay. My brother and I certainly tried to persuade her to maybe move the TV to another corner and swap the sofa and armchair around, and maybe put the cheese plant over there. But she wouldn’t have it. So it never changed.

I, on the other hand, relish change. It’s not that I get bored of things the way they are, it’s just that I find changing things around can be refreshing. When my brother moved into my house we decided to shift some of the furniture around upstairs (the bedroom) to give him a bit more space and still leave an area free for me to use my weights. The space saved was pretty small but the psychological change made the room feel much larger and more welcoming. There’s no rational argument for it, but I suppose “a change is as good as a rest”.

So with this spirit in mind I’m trying to adapt to the fact that we’re moving rooms at work. When I joined the company for the first time (this is my second spell with them) over 3 years ago the development team lived downstairs in a large room alongside the managers and the customer engineers lived upstairs. Our company builds machines so it was decided that part of the bottom floor would be converted to do the assembly, the development team moved upstairs and the managers moved into a new room at the other side of the building. And that’s how things have stayed. And it’s been great. The upstairs roof is really high, with wooden rafters, air conditioning, large windows with views out over a wooded area filled with squirrels and the like. It’s fair to say that it’s lovely.

But change is afoot. We’ve had a couple of spells of downsizing and are half the size we used to be. So we’re rattling around in a huge office with enough room to each swing a grizzly bear around without fear of interference from each other (assuming the grizzlies don’t mind). So the company’s decided to sub-let upstairs to another company and we’ll move back downstairs again and things will be kind of like they used to. Except they won’t.

There two very large glass doors downstairs that used to provide a lot of light into the room and hide the fact that the rest of the windows are very small. Unfortunately, the room is now divided into two rooms with a wall and door in between. This means that the room we’ll be moving in to has a lot less light and ambiance than it used to. And doesn’t compare to the place we’re moving from. So some people aren’t happy about it. It’s not the dot com boom any more so people like us can’t just shake our rattles and get what we want (those were the days) so we have to make do.

But if I’m honest, I’m quite looking forward to it. Simply because it’s going to be different and therefore a bit of fun for a while (until the novelty wears off). I could be negative and say we’re getting the rough end of the stick (all the nice rooms are ear-marked for customer demos or constructing machines) and that by sub-letting upstairs we’re going to be a bit screwed if we want to expand again when the economy improves.

No. I’d rather be positive and say it’s a new beginning. The dawn of a new era (to use my favourite, over-used expression). I won’t have such a nice view out the window as I do at the moment (I’m watching a grey squirrel foraging for food right now) and the work will remain the same, but with some more lighting and some plants dotted around the place it should take on a character of its own. Only time will tell, and Friday is the day of the move. I might take pictures at 20 minute intervals and do one of those photo sequences where an empty room is transformed into a bustling office…