Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

I have worked in some places where the decor of the office seemed almost more important than the mission of the enterprise. At a certain business where I was lady in waiting to a three person executive committee, there were high standards set even for the administrative assistants who sat in tiny cubicles barely large enough to contain their desks, chairs and computers. One framed 5" x 7" photo of the family or pet was allowed, a clean coffee mug may be placed on the desk if it sat on a coaster, a single flower in a bud vase (not wilted, please) was allowed, but not a green plant . . sheesh. However, should some administrative assistant decide she didn't care for the restrictions and would simply not decorate . . . oh, bad mistake. She was perceived as not being a team player. In my own office in the corporate wing, I displayed objets d' art worth a month's salary, and purchased by me personally. It was expected. That was then. This is now. I'm not corporate any more.

A couple of posts back, I wrote about David providing the best of everything we need to do our jobs exceedingly well. It's true ~ he does. So come on, board my bus and ride with me to the door of my much loved workplace. I'll give you the tour!

Here is how the technology serves me. Dual monitors show me the jobs pending and YouTube. GPS shows me where each of the home dudes is at any given time, whether his ignition is on, how fast he's going, whether he's at a stop, and how long any of that has been going on.








I could take pictures and write words about the fine equipment and machinery the homes have at hand, but I'm not sure readers of this blog would find a dissertation about solution hoses and buddy jugs and HydroForces and throttles all that exciting. Suffice it to say we are all provided with what we need to execute the job well.

And then, in the spirit of the corporate paisley palace, we have certain aesthetics we enjoy. On one small space of wall, I display framed Badger art and a plaque with a favored Lincoln quote, "Whatever you are, be a good one." There are lovely, healthy plants, as well as the bromeliad sisters. Mr. Redfish occupies one corner of my desk alongside his stuffed cat, and the parakeets enjoy a sunny spot in a window. But there, I suspect, ends any resemblance to any other business office one can think of. I think the rest of what we have going on would please Lewis Carroll and others who are freethinkers and whimsical. Traditionalists probably would not find us charming. That's OK. I'm not corporate any more.


After one scratches the surface of our high-tech environment, it turns out that we are simple people, elemental and quirky ones at that. If anyone remembers the rallying cry from the movie The Perfect Storm, "We're Gloucestermen!", we have a similar one. "We're carpet cleaners!" We know what we are - no illusions, no pretensions. We know how to use technology, but we do many things simply in ways that work. Period. No frills. So while I sit at a cherry desk suitable to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, the other furniture surfaces in the room are folding tables and a bookcase so laughable it defies description. Though I sit seductively attractive under my mood lighting, when the front door opens and the sun shines in, one could get a snicker or two. I was musing on why I get so many nasties on the telephone, while virtually everyone who walks through our doors gives a large smile. Some of them stand in the entryway with their faces nearly split in half by a big old cheeser. What? Nasty people only use the phone and nice people only come in person? That's a bit hard to accept. And then it occurred to me. Maybe the in-person visitors are laughing at us! Especially the ones who ask about certain objects or get the grand tour. Come on! Join me. I'll show you around.

The white rectangular object is my portable safe. Inside it, I keep all the things a small business manager would keep inside her safe. On top of it I keep but two of my vast collection of coyote gourd maracas and a piece of dried coyote gourd vine, placed before a lovely framed print of some gourds. The X you see is a pair of large ancient, heavily rusted nails from the abandoned mines at the dunes where I spent solstice. On the paper plate are rocks I collected at the Valley of Fire and the dunes. I've met few rocks in the desert that I didn't want to bring home. A visitor to our office who was seated pretty far across the room from me thought I had a paper plate filled with pieces of meat. I wouldn't want to bite into my rocks! I don't eat meat. My safe is bolted to the middle of a six foot folding table. Any thief who thought to leg it with my safe would have a terrible time maneuvering it all through the door! The little vignette on top of the safe is art to me. I'm not corporate any more.

Behold two shelves of the Through the Looking Glass bookcase. I will describe the items displayed and the reader will draw his own conclusion. It is an explanation of the bookcase items that generally brings on the fixed smile to the visitor's face. There is my coffee mugs that says "Don't make me bring out the flying monkeys." This is warning from me to the homes. See my plaque that says "Learn From Yesterday", my bag of potpourri, four rocks collected in the desert outside of Baker and my coyote leg bone with hide and sinew clinging. The coffee mug that says "meticulosity" was selected for me by a young fan who considers me her mentor. She said the word should be tattooed upon my forehead so everyone will know from the beginning. There is a small collection of books on the upper shelf and a collection of more serious books on the lower, including a volume of Emily Dickinson and a large 1920s Spanish/English dictionary. There is a ceramic seashell holding an artificial lemon and there is a lovely decorative gourd made for me by Mother Badger featuring a strawberry design. Every single item on those shelves means something to me. Each has a story and I like sharing space with it all. I'm not corporate any more.

World class data collection and storage system: this one was difficult for me. I am not the sharpest tool in the shed about some things. Our radios go off continually, new information coming in at a quick pace. Who bought fuel, where and for how much? Credit card payments need to be recorded, and daily bank deposits. David, Troy and I can each take the radio transmission and it was impractical to have all three of us accessing the same reports and documents at the same time. How to manage all of that? Well, I'm a natural at creating the charts and spreadsheets. But we all needed to have access to all the information all the time. It was David who showed me how to insert a pushpin into the drywall, place the chart or spreadsheet on a bright plastic clipboard, and voila! No pre-existing policy or procedure, no required forms at hand from the beginning. Just figure it out and make it work. I'm not corporate any more.

Our world is replete with every imaginable kind of alert tone, announcement noise and attention grabber. Some of the tones are common to all of us and some are highly individual. A few of the homes are partial to an announcer that sounds like a toddler giggling and then farting. When the Badger drops me an e-mail, it is announced by the sound of a bicycle bell. One morning, a noise was heard that caused everyone to stop talking and look toward my desk. "What the hell, Les? What's that one?" "That's my timer, homes." For I get up from my desk every half hour and do something. I hula hoop or do wall push-ups. I use the wobble board or do stretches or use the weights or resistance bands you see pictured. My job can be deeply stressful. I need to break the tension and keep my body healthy. I do this for me. I'm not corporate any more.

I'd like to thank the reader for joining me on the bus ride and the tour today. Please come again, as there is much more to share about this little world. I like to share. I like to connect in some way with others. I'm not corporate any more.

In my ears right now: I posted a Gloria Estefan song in my last writing. Thinking about Gloria Estefan makes one think about Jon Secada and I went into a reverie. In 1992, a two-year-old thought I was the most remarkable, amazing and wonderful woman. She wanted to be just like me. She wanted blue eyes like mine, even though I think her nearly black ones are the most lovely I've ever seen. She wanted to wear clothes that looked like mine. We each had a "twirly" skirt. In our twirly skirts we danced to Jon Secada. The video is unremarkable 1990s MTV, VH1 video and the song is merely "catchy". But when Jon put his hands and arms in the air and moved his body, we put our hands and arms in the air and moved our bodies. And we twirled. And we danced.

Something that charmed me: Cesar worked for 10 years running a route for a porta-potty business. He knows every street in this valley and he knows when most of the developments were built within that 10 years. He knows every intersection and which ones have stop signs or lights. Cesar and Justin were partnered one day, Cesar at the wheel like always. Too late, already into the intersection, he realized a new stop sign had been put up at a spot that had not previously had one. One does not want to try to stop one of our war wagons on a dime so Cesar kept rolling, quickly checking his rearview and looking from side to side. The cops had him in a heartbeat and he thought, "Ticket!" as he pulled over to the curb. He rolled down the window and looked for the approaching officer in his rearview and side mirrors. No cop! What was going on? Typically, they do not hide themselves. In the meantime, Justin was fumbling at his belt for his BlackBerry holster. For, you see, I had just chirped Justin. And Justin had assigned to me the police siren alert tone.

Carpet Cleaner Humor

The technicians are required to keep in close contact with Mission Control. They have many freedoms out in the world and the balance is that we watch them move through the valley on GPS at all times. They must call in from every job at its beginning, tell us the value of the job and then report payment at the end. No exceptions.

When the company was young, we simply communicated by telephone. Everyone had a cell phone to call in on. But some of the home dudes didn't pay their bill, or had a plan that gave them too few minutes, or forgot their phone 3 days a week . . . OK, the company purchased walkie-talkies and required everyone to carry them. Every one of the men caught onto the walkie-talkie thing immediately. I was dumber than a box of rocks. They'd played army in their youth, I hadn't. I didn't like this device. For whatever reason, we used "handles" in the day and the technicians all took rodent-themed monikers. I named myself Dumb Bunny. I like to think none of them would have come up with that.

Then came the BlackBerries and it was miraculous ~ I was a whiz and they were a bit slower. David said, "Well, yeah, it's basically a computer and you're good at that." So the guys helped me with ringtones and I taught them what an Excel spreadsheet was. They showed me the navigation system and I showed them how to e-mail the digital video clips they take with their BlackBerries. It's reciprocal. It's nice. If you teach me this, I'll teach you that.

Rolling around in Las Vegas every day must be surreal. It is an odd place. It is peopled by the best and the worst sorts. We deal with them all. My technicians see things in homes that are enviable, disgusting, lovely, laughable. Once I had a home dude come off of his route, describe something he'd seen and ask me if I thought he should call Child Protective Services. They are offered everything from cold drinks to food, from handshakes to threats to throw them bodily off the property. They are flirted with and propositioned, insulted or asked if they can help a customer out because of hard times. Many radio transmissions include a comment or conversation about the amazing thing they've just seen or the odd situation that just occurred.

They are offered household items frequently. "Hey, Limes, would anybody want a black leather recliner?" "Have you heard of anyone who might want a kitten?" When we clean carpets for move-out, we often arrive at a point where the customer is willing to simply walk away and leave things behind. And traversing the city as they do, these guys see every yard sale there is.

Cesar and Matt finished a job and walked across the street to a yard sale. There Matt, 22, saw an item that so fascinated him, the seller said, "Take it for free, young man, and enjoy it." Returning to the van, Cesar employed his BlackBerry to send me a photo by e-mail, but didn't say a word to me. What I received at my desk:

As everyone else received the photo by e-mail, the radios began to buzz and we all became raucous. Soon I was informed that Matt had named him Pedro and Pedro was on the way in to the office. By the end of the day, I could see technicians shooting up the stairs - their workdays were over and they wanted to meet Pedro. We laughed until we nearly squirted milk out of our noses. A suggestion was made that we mount Pedro out on the barn that Troy built.

Here's Cesar posing Pedro on the barn:

We all cackled for days and visitors to our office were a bit startled at the sight of Pedro resting in a chair near my desk. We began to talk about how we knew we couldn't really put him out on the barn because the elements would quickly destroy him. So finally, Pedro was put inside the barn to lead a dark existence. He continues to startle everyone who goes to the barn for supplies or equipment - he's a pretty big boy and looks menacing in the dark.

My own private source of merriment: Matt is a young man with a brilliant mind. He's a good worker and a great salesman. He's an astounding artist. He is spiritual and both David and I have had many long, deeply philosophical discussions with him. But sometimes something will pop up - things he doesn't know about - that make one just go "What??" I attribute it to his extreme youth. So . . . Matt thought Pedro was a barnyard piggie and had to check in with me to see if the other guys were giving him the business about an animal called a boar. "No, Matt, it's true. Pedro is a boar. Barnyard piggies are pink and smell like baby powder. "

In my ears right now: the sweet warbling of my two birds and the Badger's pair of birds. Sometimes they just squawk. Right now they're lovely.

Something that charmed me today: the Badger's great placement in the race this morning; the strength and confidence he showed going into this race and coming out of it.