American Dreaming - 1990's / Part XII

Despite the unsatisfying outcome from that effort, I did outlast the Ferengi. Life within the company settled down for a spell. The operating unit in Manhattan was moving along. I began to shift my focus back to managing the units. That’s when I suffered a few notable setbacks.

A couple of my close friends and key cogs in my support (emotionally) group left the company. My manager (VP of operations) had promoted me in the middle of the NYC buildout to regional director. I think that promotion was pretty much in name only but, it was an effort on her part to give me a bit more notoriety when I was contending with the Ferengi. She decided to go back to the small entrepreneurial company that she had left two years ago to join us. Whit her went the best reporting relationship I was likely to have in my professional life.
In addition to the loss of my manager, two of my close confidents also left the company. All of this change left me reporting to a different Regional VP (for a time) but it also signaled the beginning of the end of my time with this organization.

I had developed a really good group of folks within my staffing. I hired well. We were a fairly close group and those folks would do about anything for me. I was truly blessed. Losing my friends left my wicked schedule without some of the lighthearted banter and fun that was one of the more appealing aspects of the job for me.

It was shortly after the loss of my two friends I was handed another assignment. I was being asked to oversee the movement of our Boston office from its present location to some other suitable area within the city limits of Boston.

I had spent only a short amount of time dealing with the Boston office up to that point in time. I had managerial responsibilities to the two PC techs that were assigned to that operating unit but because the business model for that office was so different from either NYC or my home office in Troy, NY they had little cause to call on me for much.

I was to work with our facilities manager in trying to track down a suitable relocation spot for this office. We spent three different trips that were essentially day trips (Boston was about 3.5 hours away from our Troy locale). In each of them, the office spaces we were reviewing were nice enough but, the telecommunications aspects of each building was wanting. I found that a lot of the older buildings in Boston suffered greatly from basement flooding. The telecommunications demarcation point in all the buildings (we looked at) was in the basement and below the high water mark clearly visible on the walls of these structures.

I was extremely reluctant to want to endorse any of the options that our facilities manager had managed to drum up. In the mean time, our deadline was looming large as the lease was due to expire within 60 days. If we were going to make a move, it had to be pretty accomplished pretty quickly.

It was during the third trip that we wound up circling back to the existing office near South Station in Boston. I took that opportunity to confer briefly with the two PC techs that were assigned there. They were understandably curious as to what progress we had made in determining a suitable landing spot for the operating unit after this current lease.

I also took this opportunity to discuss some things with the current landlord. I originally asked for some time with him to begin to lay the groundwork for the move. It was during that conversation that I found out that another of his current tenants (on the same floor) was also leaving within the next month. I asked about the possibility of moving the operating unit down the hall to this newly vacated spot. The office space was a little bigger than the current area that the Boston office used. It would provide for a little bit of the anticipated growth while avoiding a good deal of moving expense.

I called in the facilities manager and passed the idea by her. Of course, neither of us was authorized to execute another lease without checking with our corporate contracts folks but, in principle it seemed like the best of the options being presented to us at that time.

The contracts manager was more than happy to move on this idea. The current lease was rolled into an agreement to move into this new space. We would be granted some additional parking in the building’s basement parking area and all in all, it seemed that we had almost “dodged a bullet” in finding new space. The existing staff that were located in the office were perhaps the most relieved group of folks.