Moving Day

My office situation has changed.

As a result of monies suddenly becoming available, our office situation has been remodeled. Fear Beag and Fear Mor, who have sat in the room directly outside of mine since I started work here in New Home (almost two years now), have moved to an adjacent (but currently not connected area) behind my office. The room they are in is destined to become an archive facility.

It was odd as I worked away in my office during the afternoon hearing the sounds of moving occurring, the smell of cleaning supplies, the banter that always occurs after relocation: "This is incredibly gross!" and "So that's where that got to!" It was also odd to go into the new office and see them setting up in their new space with radio blaring away as they personalized and organized their space.

When most of their items were moved I sat there, working quietly away, occasionally stopping and listening to the silence, then working on. As I sat their listening, I felt the vague stirrings of something I had not contemplated: loneliness.

Not loneliness in the sense of being alone (good heavens, they're right next door and I'm sure I'll see them a great deal). It was a more profound loneliness, the loneliness being something other than the others are.

I have always prided myself on my ability to not be position or level conscious, that even as a manager I attempt (probably not always effectively) to have a relationship with my reports of primes inter pares; that is, first among equals. I'm ultimately responsible, but my opinion and my strategies are certainly not always the best - and I'm certainly no better than anyone that reports to me.

What I felt as I went in, watched them unpacking and settling into an environment which was theirs and not ours, was that sense of separation, that aloneness that seems to inevitably come when you are the manager of others, that in some ways (willing or unwilling) you exercise responsibility and power.

In many ways, my work relationships are my social relationships - I spend far more time there than I do anywhere else. For better or worse, those relationships have become my support network, my confidants, my daily reminders that people are kind and helpful even as they are silly.

I also wonder (in the back of my head) if some of this simply stems from the self-acknowledged fact that I want desperately to be liked, to feel like I am part of something, to please others . I want (desperately want) to feel as if I belong.

If I'm honest, I can remember this feeling as well at the previous company where Songbird and I worked, when I moved from the cube next to hers to an office. Nothing specifically changed - except I no longer enjoyed the close interaction I had with my colleagues, throwing wry comments or songs over the cube walls, or just rolling around the side to talk. Suddenly such interactions were effort and not as spontaneous; suddenly I was my boss, the guy in the office who wasn't intimately connected with the inner workings of the department but swooped in from the outside to see how things were going.

I'm sure this initial feeling will pass (especially if they put a door in), and things will be back to some semblance of normality soon. The general insanity and hilarity will ensue and it will seem (at some level) as if nothing has changed.

But I cannot hide that as of yesterday, I seem to have heard the "click" of a chapter in my work and personal life closing deep in my soul, one I suspect will not reopen in the way it previously was.