Here’s the back story…
Laurie knows that I have freakish olfactory memory; I have a good nose and my nose knows. If I’ve smelled it once, I can usually identify it again. Furthermore, a smell often brings up an entire host of memories. I know that for some folk a song or colors or some other trigger can put them right back in a memorable place and time. For me, it is a smell.
For example, I got on the elevator early one afternoon last month and immediately recognized a smell that I hadn’t detected in years. It was so out of context, just to satisfy my curiosity, I stepped out of the elevator and asked the receptionist if she remembered who came through moments before. The aroma took me back to the company which employed most of my family during my teenage years. It was the after lunch fragrance of the owner (we called him “the old man”); he didn’t always eat the same lunch, but he did always drink the same lunch. I’m confident that whoever was last in that elevator had a whiskey or two at lunch. And while I wouldn’t trust my nose to this level of detail, I would further guess that it was a double Chivas Regal on the rocks.
So, while I sat at my makeshift desk in our dining room earlier this week, Laurie asked, “When you have a minute, could you come smell this pantry? Something is not right.”
On my next walk to the coffee pot, I stopped by the pantry and put the knowing nose to work. I called up to Laurie saying “there’s an old potato in there somewhere.” Sure enough, some renegade potato had escaped its bag some time back, finding refuge in a dark corner of our pantry. Case solved; problem eradicated.
One of the side effects of my “transition” from Northwest was that we had to move out of a small windowless office that our church was using for an office. It served as storage, workspace and a meeting spot for the church, and Laurie used it several days each week as an office. With the end of my duties at Northwest, Laurie had to move her office back home too.
So… now to the point of greatifying the home office. When Laurie said, “I didn’t smell the potatoes,” she was saying that there was something great about physically leaving the house and going to the office. For most of our nearly ten years of serving our church, the church office has been our home office. But for the past year, since moving the church to Northwest’s campus, we have had use of that little office. Laurie found it an enormous help since when she is at home, she simply cannot not smell the potatoes. It didn’t matter that there was church work calling, knowing that the panty needed attention downstairs meant putting aside the church work to handle what appeared to be more urgent in the kitchen.
Saying “I didn’t smell the potatoes when I wasn’t using the home office” was an admission that the urgency wasn’t real; the renegade potato could certainly wait.
Nearing the one month anniversary of my makeshift home office, I know that I have to develop disciplines to greatify my home office. While I can actually let the potato wait, there is a potentially long list of other distractions that could easily take me away from my work. It seems to me that steps ahead for me to greatify the home office include:
- Establishing office hours and a routine (So far, it still feels like every day is a Saturday; I need a weekday routine for the home office.)
- Making the office less makeshift and temporary (I need to get stuff into drawers and out of boxes).
- Getting a more comfortable setup, espescially a desk chair (I think we purchased the one I’m using twenty years ago and it is time to be retired).
- Establishing a way to collaborate with others in the home office (my real office has always been a place for my work alone, but more importantly my work with others; the home office has never been a place for meetings).
These are some of the ways I’m starting. Got any other great ideas?
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