Who picks this stuff?

I work from a small back office in my home most days, so when I get a chance to get out now and again, I find that I take notice of my surroundings. When you add in some recent travel, I’ve definitely taken notice of my surroundings, especially office space and waiting areas.

For example, I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of random consistency. That’s my long way of saying, one place tends to look an awful lot like the next. If you’ve seen one hotel, hospital, office building, and government building then you’ve seen them all.

Amazon for office managers?

It makes me think that the office managers across North America are all buying from the same catalog. Does a Waiting Rooms R Us exist that I’m not aware of? I have to believe that’s the case, there’s too many common elements from one building to the next.

So, my eyes perked up the other day when I stopped by an office building and felt like the building and the grounds were different than the norm. Oh, I loved the coffee shop on the ground floor, but that’s far from being extraordinary. No, the thing that I noticed immediately were the plush, comfortable chairs. They looked like they were new, not something left over from the last century.

In addition, instead of bad, moronic TV playing on the wall, they funneled in some relaxing spa music. I could have sat in one of those chairs all day long and never complained. For the more energetic sort, they had few simple games located on a coffee table, a Newton’s Cradle, with four suspended balls that gave a nice lesson in Physics, and a Rubik’s cube for the logically minded.

Oh, how outrageous!

I’ve noticed too that even the most drabbiest of spaces tend to rely on plants to cheer things up. Money trees in one corner, ferns in another. The doctor’s office where I had to wait in recently proudly displayed an array of plants and a trophy case full of United Way awards. I guess they were supposed to mean something to me.

The art they chose said something about them too. Most artwork was pretty boring, nothing I would ever dream of hanging in my own home, but there were some interesting images of flowers and cubes. I suppose it was flowers to cheer me up and cubes to get me organized.

When I visited the office later on another trip, I got up the nerve to ask the two people at the front counter who selected the art work and the receptionist joked that it was picked out by a relative of the owner.

So in short, no science to it all, no Amazon, just plain, good old nepotism at work.