Wednesday, July 4, 2012

How to move your office overseas

I have moved a whole lot in my time and lived out of many suitcases. However, I have never moved an office. I hope I never move another office. For some reason, some tragically inexplicable reason, I was one of a few people still in the office during the process which was quite unfortunate. I should explain the full story. 


1 April we were evicted. Our landlady had mental issues and thought we were out to get her. She refused to take the rent money because of his paranoia. Her son wanted to collect on it. There was also a daughter that wanted it. The son and the daughter had a feud between them. We decided to get out of the family drama.

April and May we went house hunting. We’d been in our old office for over four years in a fabulous neighborhood. However, we soon learned that within those four years, our neighborhood had been "Khmer gentrified" and we were now priced out. There were also almost no options. Three different real estate agents took us to the same properties. Our boss visited twice, and we took him to the same properties. They weren't even good properties.

Early May we found a good spot in a bad location. Late May, we found the perfect spot but the landlord double-crossed us for someone who offered him more. Early June, we found the office. It wasn’t perfect. The location was passable, but all other options had dissipated and so we settled...like a tired shopper at Best Buy.

The last two weeks of June, we had to clean out old office. There was junk coming out of every cranny and corner. Every departing expat had left old furniture, kitchen wear, and chaos in piles. Filing cabinets hadn’t been cleaned out…ever…and we pulled out telegrams from 1984. We sorted through hundreds of books and DVDs, built piles of broken computer hardware to dump, and furniture that rats had eaten away. Part of this is organizational culture…never get rid of something because you may want/need it later. Part of it is an archaic emphasis on thriftiness; the ability to reuse anything for eternity. A final contributing factor was that our previous year without leadership had literally allowed things to pile up. For days, we continued to pile up trash and junk. We gave away unwanted junk to the national staff who wanted it, which turned out to be quite complicated, as we learned later.

Originally, I estimated that moving would take two days. It took a week. It didn't help that the people hired to wire internet and power took three times as long as expected, slowing everything down by multiple days while they drilled holes in the wall. We moved smaller pieces in a pick-up truck for three days ourselves, loading and unloading. On the fourth day, we hired a huge truck and several moto-taxi drivers to move the larger heavier pieces. They made three trips, and unloaded everything haphazardly into the yard of the new office. They moved the piles of junk I had designated as throw-away, and didn’t move other things I wanted moved. It was a disaster. We let them go by lunch time. However, going back to the old office, we realized they left they had left the 50+ potted plants on the third-floor veranda in the old office. This was the only point when I became angry. However, several of us went back and moved the plants by hand, down three flights of stairs and into the pick-up. No one was happy. 

This was the move. For weeks, we looked like red-necked hicks with junk and  furniture strewn everywhere. We strung up a tarp to house old furnisher and “junk” that no one knew what to do with (infuriating to me). It took weeks to organize the new place and we continued to throw things away.

I learned several key things in the move.
1.    I’m not in charge
2.    No one else is in charge.
3.    It’s futile to have a plan.
4.    It’s futile to explain the plan to anyone else
5.    Unless you are a tall male, you’re ignored
6.    Unless you speak Khmer, you’re ignored
7.    It’s almost impossible to get rid of junk.
8.    Cambodia is where all order comes to die.

Don’t ever move an office overseas. If you do, spend the weeks leading up to it developing your male-ness and your local language skills. Once you’ve done this, then wait for everything to fall apart. Something about living overseas mandates nothing go according to plan.

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