Can you hear me now?

I spent most of the first week in August away at the beach. While it wasn’t perfectly relaxing, being away was relaxing enough that I managed to stem the constant, low-level flow of adrenaline that seems to be my physical reaction to the insanities and absurdities that come with working for a cash-strapped, badly managed non-profit. It wasn’t easy though.

Letting go of all that frustration required walks on the beach, lots of time sitting and reading, good food, some arcade games, and a couple of longish bike rides over flat terrain in a place gleefully accustomed to seeing bikes on the road. It also required that I remember a couple of key tactics for staying sane in a working environment not long on either communication or transparency: dealing with what is instead of what might be, and making everything as much fun as possible.

When we moved office in the summer of 2008 ostensibly the reason for the move downtown was so we could attract more workers to our field canvass and so that it would be easier for the campaign staff we were going to build to attend meetings with other groups and to lobby decision makers. I think it was mostly because one senior staff person was tired of going all the way uptown to the Metro Stop That Time Forgot where there has been virtually no commercial development over the past 30 years and longed for her “glory days” of rolling out of the office and into her favorite dive bar in Dupont Circle.

So my employer signed a 5-year lease securing a suite that takes up the entire 11th floor of an eleven story building just off McPherson Square only a couple of blocks away from the White House, an easy Metro and even easier cab ride to Capitol Hill, and very near a lot of groups with which we work in coalition. And all of that would matter if we’d had the funding to actually add staff.

Oh, we hired a Political Director in 2008 out of the ruins of the Edwards campaign supposedly because he was a super fundraiser who could help us bring in tons of money with his connections. Not only did he not bring in tons of money – in the 6 months he worked for us he did one e-mail fund raising campaign which brought in exactly $30 and the event he organized at the Eastern Shore (Maryland) home of a prominent Democratic Party gadfly cost more to produce than it brought in – he never did anything to shape our external communications to supporters and he only came to the office on pay day which is what will happen when you issue live checks and you’ve hired someone who lives about 80 miles and an hour and 45 minutes away by car.

We also hired a couple of campaign staff people, one to work on global warming and renewable energy, something my organization has a huge problem communicating with our supporters about because our campaigners can’t seem to get the quarter away from their eye long enough to realize that it isn’t the same size as the sun and just maybe everyone doesn’t understand how those issues connect with our primary area of work, and one to work extremely locally with a lot of interested but under served groups in the Anacostia watershed.

But because of the way this organization funds its work, the money eventually ran out to pay the global warming and energy person, and she got fed up with not being able to actually do anything since our national global warming and energy team is lead by someone in Connecticut who is rightfully busy with doing good work on the state level, and the campaigner working on the Anacostia issues decided after about a year that what she really wanted to do was work directly with organizations helping kids.

Since both of them left we’ve got 10 people, several of whom aren’t in the office more than 5 days per month, plus a canvass staff rattling around in space designed to hold three times that many people, space that is costing $60,000 $20,000 a month (still more than double what we were paying uptown) which we don’t always pay on time, and in fact haven’t been current on in nearly a year.

The first step Management took to try to reduce the rent bite was try to sub-let space but, typical of Management’s half-assed approach to things, instead of putting an ad on Craigslist or Idealist.org or circulating it via something like the Progressive Exchange list, they put the onus on staff to come up with potential tenant candidates. When that failed, they started seriously negotiating with the building’s owners and the property management companies (we’ve had two in the past two years) about either dividing up our space on the 11th floor or about moving to another available suite.

Needless to say, our landlords aren’t making the process easy. One of my co-workers, currently on the outs with our ManagingDirector who is in charge of the DC office, told me that they are demanding a ton of fees to move to another, smaller suite. These fees include a penalty for breaking our lease on the larger suite, a moving fee, a renovation fee, and other assorted charges priced in such a way that it would take micro fine accounting to determine that moving was financially to our benefit. Yet, I’m sure that’s what Management is going to decide to do.

Monday afternoons I have a weekly, half-hour call with my direct supervisor who just happens to be in Philadelphia. Calls are pretty standard, we go through the work plan I’ve sent him earlier in the day starting with what meetings I have scheduled, progress on the project from hell, e-mails I’ve gotten requests for from our state offices, updates to the web site, data hygiene on our online supporter database, and anything else that he might have for me that I don’t know about.

It was during this “anything else” section that he mentioned that I may have “heard some scuttlebutt around the office about us moving down to the 4th floor” to which I wanted to reply that while it was no secret that we were looking to move it was unlikely that I’d heard anything specific while I was 125 miles away at the beach. Apparently it’s looking like we’re going to move at the beginning of October to a smaller suite and while the details haven’t been worked out yet, it’s firm enough for him to be relaying this information to me.

Now, there are a ton of things wrong with this plan, one of them is that half of us (including me) will be moving from the sunny front of the building  to the dark back of the building, you know, the part that overlooks the dumpsters in the alley instead of having a partial view of McPherson Square park. That change kinda makes the fact that we can open the windows in our offices sort of a moot point.

From what I have heard in the past four days, there are lots of other things about this move that suck outright. One is the fact that the “renovations” the building’s owners want to charge us for extend solely to adding a suite door in the hallway and taking out a non-bearing wall so we can have a reception desk just inside the new door. They don’t include repainting or recarpeting, and, most importantly, they don’t include adding any sort of kitchen area.

No kitchen area means no place to wash dishes which means everyone is going to be using plastic ware and disposable plates which is more than slightly hypocritical for an environmental organization. And considering that the previous property management company took 6 months (December to May) to respond to a trouble ticket about a broken heater in my office, what are the chances that this new suite is going to be anything vaguely resembling not totally gross?  I think they’re pretty freaking slim.

The other thing that sucks outright is the fact that we’re going to go from individual offices not to an open work plan, which I could totally deal with, but to shared office space for a staff used to having not only their own physical and aural space but also control over the temperature in their immediate environment.

So we’re going to from a newly renovated suite with less than two year-old paint and carpeting, a functional kitchen area, and a situation where staff have basically private offices with individual climate control to a suite with who knows what on the walls and the floors and no place to wash dishes or even a nook for a refrigerator and microwave. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since no one who makes the decisions has to work in the space.

And I probably shouldn’t be complaining; lots of people have to work under even worse conditions. I also probably shouldn’t be upset by this because none of it actually is yet; we’re still only at the speculation stage. This is where dealing with what is instead of with what might be comes into play.

The co-worker who normally keeps me informed about these things has been cut out of any unofficial communications because she “causes drama around the office” which is just a bullshit way of our ManagingDirector saying that my co-worker actually tells people what’s going on which puts the ManagingDirector in a position of not being  in control of the information flow. This is where making everything as much fun as possible comes into play: I’m running an organizational communications experiment.

It was August 9, 2010 when my direct supervisor informed me that it was likely that we would be moving down to the fourth floor at the beginning of October. That’s 37 work days until October 1 for people who have been in offices two years to sort through and pack up not only their personal workspace but also the rest of the office.

When do you think the official announcement is going to be about a beginning of October move? My bet is on some time the week of September 20th; if they send it out that morning that will give us not quite 9 work days to sort through and pack everything up.

Given the way Management communicates, I think I’m being generous in my estimate. There’s part of me that hopes I’ve underestimated them. What I do know is that it will be interesting to watch.