Enjablog

You know I’ve been spending too much time at work when I wake up at 4am already thinking about work.

Don’t get me wrong though. It wasn’t one of those, “I came up with the solution in my sleep, so how can I charge those hours to the client??” moments. I woke up thinking about rearranging my office. I was already fully conscious, working out what was wrong with my office set-up, minutes from a solution, before I realized I was awake and contemplating this dilemma I didn’t even know I had.

The main problem was that I didn’t want my back completely to the door, so I had shifted my monitor to one corner of the desk. This allowed me to not have creepy people sneak up on me, but that also meant that I was constantly angled in front of my desk, which was starting to hurt my back/neck and I kept banging my knee on the pen/paper drawer in the middle. There’s also a window opposite the door, whose blinds have to be closed to prevent glare on the monitor.

Old office set-up: Bookshelf along the door wall, desk1 with drawers on the left side, desk2 with drawers on the right side, a support beam in the corner, window behind desk2, and a 2-drawer filing cabinet.*

The monitor away from both desks left a lot of space in front of me and to my right. I originally thought this would be a good idea, since I am right-handed and would want things easily accessible to my dominant side. I later found that this was a terrible idea, since I’m a right-handed mouse user and hold papers in my left hand when working.

It was a relatively simple solution, but dilemmas included the ethernet drop coming out of the ceiling behind desk1, no outlet along the window wall, and making sure I had the right desk in the right place so all drawers were accessible. New office set-up*:

It has me facing the door, my monitor facing away from the window, and I don’t bump my knee. I have usable space next to my computer to work with others, either sitting next to or across from me. My monitor is an easily rotatable position, also good for working with others. And my second desk has plenty of space for me to spread papers out without other people moving them around when they need to talk to/show me something.

Side rant: Another annoyance I have with CreepyGuy. He writes on my papers, marking them obsolete or crossing things out. While it’s true that the previous versions are obsolete when he brings me a new copy (Yeah, paper copies of everything.), I also date and timestamp the things he hands me, so I know which one is current. I like to keep the old copies around in case changes get reversed (which happens every time a revision turns out to be not a good revision) and I can revert to an older version and my notes will still be usable.

I was surprised at how quickly I was able to rearrange my office. I don’t think I had any witnesses. At least, if anyone walked by, I didn’t notice and they didn’t offer to help. The desks are from like the 60s, so they’re pretty heavy-duty. I tried just lifting one end to see how heavy it was, but I wasn’t able to do it. The feet on the desks allowed for very easy sliding on the carpet though, so it all worked out. Yay friction!

*Drawings are not to scale. I made a drawing in AutoCAD, under the guise of learning to be more proficient with it. And it came out pretty nicely, considering I didn’t have a measuring tape or anything. So my unit of measure was hands. Which is relatively accurate (right hand, 8″ thumb to pinky), though I didn’t bother converting to any kind of “standard” unit. Anyway, these were made in Paint.

P.S. It was just like Animal Crossing. I took the furniture out of my pocket and slid things around and rotated them. It was *awesome*.