Since I was last in the office, I’ve moved offices……if you see what I mean! I’ve given up my old office and moved into a new one about 200 feet around the corner from where I was before. It’s got positives and negatives in as much as I’m nowhere near the team I mostly work with now so that’s bad because I don’t get to hear conversations between the team members and therefore don’t learn what’s going on as effectively. On the other hand, I can see across the open plan office now to where they are so I don’t have to leave my seat to see whether or not the person I need to speak to is on the phone anymore.

When I got to the office this morning, all my worldly goods (work-wise at least) were piled up in plastic crates in my new office and of course nothing worked!!! My VDU screen stand had been broken, my VDU itself isn’t working either, hence my laptop open rather than the bigger screen. I had no chair and too many filing cabinets!

I arrived at about 8am and was straight into meeting mode with an all-dayer (no, not some jazz-funk party, an extremely lengthy meeting about budgets and three year plans and you know how much I love them!!!!!) I got back to my desk for an hour late afternoon, then another meeting until 6pm so by the time I’d done my ‘day job’, I’d been in the office for more than twelve hours. Groan.

The last thing I did was to unpack my boxes and give myself a reminder of home so that while I’m away I’m comforted by seeing a Cornish beach, photos of Rosie and Archie and of course my precious and well thumbed dictionary and thesaurus.

So, I decided that as a fairly significant occasion in my working life, I’d photograph it even though photos of desks aren’t at all interesting to anyone other than the desk’s owner! You can see my cabinet, stocked up with give-aways – Halloween candles, cocktail stirrers, mouse-mats….even an award from last year’s awards ceremony! You can see my precious mug with R&A photos on either side, given to me by DM for my birthday a couple of years ago. You can see a bendy Transvasin man – I still love these little things, given to me by a client. There are boxes of slides from conference papers I’ve given over the years (we don’t use them anymore but I like to keep a record of all the ones I’ve done. My ‘boss of the year’ trophy is on the bookcase too. The megaphone was from a photo shoot for our marketing campaign that’s just being rolled out now.

All-in-all, it’s my little oasis of calm at work and I’m relishing it between now and when I have to give it up at Christmas because I won’t be there enough to warrant it after that.

Last year, I was being a bit saucy and two years ago, I was in mourning!