So, at the day job, we’ve just moved into new office space. I 99.98% love it. All the lights are LED and set to a really lovely, relaxing white. The walls are beautiful colors and there are areas where you could, conceivably, sit and pretend you’re at someone’s home about to have tea and cookies. There are tables with runners and vases and there’s lots of artwork most of which I like. Total win!
Except.
Almost everything is slightly off center. Most of the pictures are crooked to some degree or not hung in a way that doesn’t make me think, hold on here…. something is off. There’s a large space with a beautiful table in the center, and a couch and mirror in the center of the wall at one end. The table is placed off center to the mirror, and literally, everyone who walked by the first few times would stop and cock their heads … because it wasn’t quite right. Plus, the table has a fabric runner down the middle, very pretty, and a large vase in the center. Except the runner was not aligned to the exact center of the table. And the vase was not aligned in the center of the runner. There are, in fact, two other tables with runners and vases, also not aligned. And at the end of the one corridor that ends in a wall, they hung a tapestry, so so pretty! And it was crooked.
I discovered that my colleague also noticed the off-centeredness of everything and it was also driving him crazy. We had several conversations about the pictures that weren’t hung so it wasn’t just…. off. Anyway, I straightened all the vases and runners because it was driving me batty. My colleague helped me align one of them. Because he too was so bothered by it. He straightened some of the artwork. I couldn’t safely reach the tapestry so it continued to be just so slightly off center.
Then the painters had to put another coat of paint on the walls and all the artwork came down. Everything went back up, still mostly crooked. The tapestry, however, was now noticeably crooked. I said “Hey, colleague, look at that!” And we both were deeply unsettled.
And then!
One day I saw that the tapestry had been straightened. Yay!!! When I returned to my desk, I said to my colleague, “Good news! They straightened the tapestry!”
And he says, “Oh, I did that. It was driving me crazy.”
And that is why I like where I work.
Tags: off center