There was this one time that I left our office out the back door, only to find a homeless couple living in a car parked back there. Their car had broken down and was pulled haphazardly into a spot that hidden from street view. I talked to them; their situation was unfortunately typical—a medical emergency had drained their savings. The solid job the husband had wouldn’t wait for him to get better. They’d run out of options.
I went back inside and got them some drinks and some snacks and made a crazy decision. I would let them stay in our office overnight and would sort out their situation in the morning. I dropped off the snacks and then went back inside, locking up all the offices and lab. I found some boxes of instant ramen and some fruit in the refrigerator and set them out in our break room, invited the car-couple in and prayed I hadn’t done something idiotic as I went home. I didn’t sleep well that night either. What would they steal? Would they damage something? What parts of our insurance or lease had I just violated? My worry about protecting the office made me pretty miserable.
The next morning I woke up early, stopped by Safeway to pick up some breakfast for the couple and headed back to the office. They were fine. Everything was fine. They’d called a relative during the evening who was coming back over to help with the car that day. There’s more to their story, but let’s leave it that we managed to get them sorted out with a minimum of drama.
Not so much for me, though. In my fit of paranoia, I had locked all the offices and the lab. I didn’t have the keys to open them. No one had ever locked their doors before, so while we may have had keys at one point, they were long gone. By some strange coincidence, I did have a ladder handy. I set about climbing up and through the drop ceiling outside each space. I jumped down into each office and, unlocked each from the inside. By the time everyone else arrived that morning, the doors were open, the homeless couple was fed and waiting on a tow truck out back, and I was a mess. The entire time I was climbing and crawling and jumping, I was thinking about what a stupid invention an office is. The function of an office is to keep people out; it is a shut off space, protecting an outside view. Offices make you want to lock doors. An office is a statement about position and location; it keeps the world outside in a beat-up Honda.
I haven’t been able to have a proper office since then, and it has worked out just fine. When I was made interim CEO of a different company sometime later, I moved into a cube near the ex-CEOs colossal fish tank of an office; this caused some concern. The executive team wondered if I was going to make them give up their walls and doors. The new CEO moving into a cube is the kind of symbolic act that is fear-inducing (in an ironic way). In another company, they tried to give me the only office, and I said no. In yet another company they set aside an office for me, and I made them turn it into a conference room for us all to use. Each time I do this some executive worries I am trying to take some space away from them—such is the power of a door and a window. I am, however, always content to let them have their enclosed spaces, as long as they will let me have the freedom not to shut things out, or pen myself up. Work is better this way.