Welcome to my Office

So in the beginning there was my cube (sorry, no pictures). There were toys and there were computers and there was a space that I would go to every day to work. It was limited but it was sort of mine. Then we bought a house. I quickly created a space in the house where I could work.

Over the years, it was my place to go and try new things or on the very rare occasion do some work from home. It changed a bit over the years.

When my children came along, the office went away. The toys were packed into boxes and the desktop computers went into storage. That was the end of “my space” for a long time. I had some space at work but initially, it was a shared office where I had a few items on the desk but it wasn’t really “mine”. When my company moved, I was assigned my own office. My own space. I went nuts. I brought in book shelves and toys and when you walked in, you knew who worked there. My company moved again and I was given a similar office.

I immediately made it mine, and it was the stuff of legend. I worked for that company for 17 years. From the shared space to my own space to the definitive office of Jon.

During that same time, I found I needed more and more to be able to work remotely. Not necessarily at home, but someplace other than the office. I was on call all of the time and it wasn’t always possible to go into the office to fix issues that came up. I started becoming an expert in remote work. I got better and better at being able to support my company’s needs while away. First on their laptop and then on an Ipad and then on a Chromebook.

Whereever I was, I was able to get in and do what needed to be done.

Towards the end of 2019, I found that I was working from home enough, that I needed some space here to “go away” to work. This came about partly due to spending some time at my brother-in-laws house working remotely so that someone was in the house with my Mother-In-Law who’d just had surgery.

The next iteration of my space came about shortly after I stopped working at his house.

When the rooms upstairs became bedrooms for the girls, there was a space in our basement that was going to be my new office. It would have places to store and display my toys as well as plenty of work space. We started finishing it complete with conduit for network cables and power boxes all around. It was going to be epic. Then time and money ran out. The room later became an appartment of sorts for my other Brother-In-Law and my “Study” was no longer a thing. When the B-I-L moved out, the room became storage.

When I needed space at home, that seemed the best place to start. I pulled together scraps of furniture from the mess of things we’d accumulated in the basement. A table from a school surplus sale years ago. Two shelving units that had once been in my daughters room that had been discarded.

Later, my oldest daughter would create a “nightstand” for me that ended up being a wonderful printer stand.

The space worked and it was good and I could go down there and work when I needed to without disturbing anyone upstairs. In fact, for a time, if I came up during the day, they were surprised that I was there. I was getting pulled into early morning meetings (5 and 6 am) at work and in order to accommodate them without going into the office too early, I started my day downstairs. It worked well. Until that job went away. I immediately got a new job and it was mostly in their office (in a cubical) so much of the decor that had graced my previous office was boxed up.

Then came more family medical issues, and auto issues and I was back to working from home. More long term this time and so the little space that I had started began to fill out.

Then the Pandemic struck. My company issues orders that I was to stay home and work from home for the foreseeable future. Well, that was the straw that broke the … well, you’ll get the picture.

Welcome to my space. What started out as a meager effort to make a quiet space to work from home has become a legitimate office where I can work or play, study or practice. Watch TV or just sleep. It’s the most climate controlled space in the house as it’s right next to the furnace/central-air. With almost every need within arms reach. This is where I’m me.

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