new office space

The aftershock's of Matt's revelation were felt for a while and manifested themselves in all kinds of unexpected ways. The first, and most important was that now he (we) needed a real office and nothing would do but we get one. Now, it is true that when we worked at the bank together, we used to throw a tennis ball against the wall and trouble shoot problems each other had. We both considered that our most productive time together. We had a partner in an other deal that owned some small office buildings and Matt had, from time to time needled him about making us a deal on some space. 4 or 5 months ago he'd even toured some places but they were either dumps or too nice for us to be able to afford. And since we were living on our savings' accounts, an office seemed like an complete extravagance to me. But Matt had been working from home and as he was moving out he had to have some place to hang his professional hat. When I realized that he was serious this time and that unless I did something in a hurry, we were going to end up in either a dump or someplace too expensive, I got busy. Rather than tend to our business affairs one morning I went on the Internet and found several locations of a service that provides a small office space, a receptionist, a conference room, all Internet accessibility, copier, coffee maker etc. for one very reasonable price. In fact the first place that I looked at was so pretty, cheery and professional that I instantly felt good about it. They required only a very small deposit, offered state of the art facilities and what I liked the best was, we'd be surrounded by professional looking people making a similar economical choice in offices. The hour I was there, someone had ordered a large pizza and was busy offering slices to the others sharing the space. Very friendly.

But I couldn't get Mark to even go look at it. He had made his mind up to move into Buckhead, Atlanta's most fashionable business neighborhood and our "friend" had indeed made us a bargain offer but it was on space they couldn't rent at any price. I felt like we were getting stuck, no - I felt like I was getting stuck. The space came with some used furniture, old carpet but they were willing to repaint in institutional gray. It had no phone system, no pre-wiring for Internet, no technology of any kind and we'd have to answer our own phone and bring our own Mr. Coffee. All I thought the space offered was the chance to get out of Starbucks and begin paying rent. I hated the idea and Jill already nervous about how we were plowing through our savings was flatly opposed to it. But what was I going to do? mark was just as adamant. It's days like these that i want to scream and scream. I was just beginning to feel as though we had a fighting chance to get this business launched and I'd get stressed about money and keeping everybody else from jumping off a bridge that I didn't know where to turn. But, I decided that maybe the professionalizing influence of an office would be what we needed so I went along with it.