April showers bring way too much stuff

This April has been one of the busiest months of my life, if not the busiest.

The first week of the month was consumed by preparation for our trip to England while getting work to a place where I could leave for a couple of weeks. I head up a shop of nine staff including four attorneys. I also have some unique duties and since my backup was taking her vacation at the same time, I had to train someone new in the duties. After that hectic week, we were in England (and France) for twelve days and when I returned, I had less than a week before I was moving my office to a new building.

I've been in the same office for sixteen years. The office is on Pennsylvania Ave. and is undoubtedly the nicest I will ever have. The square footage allowed for a huge desk/wall unit with an attached projecting table, a couch, several guest chairs and numerous bookshelves and file cabinets. Since the building was built in the late 1930's, the ceilings are about fifteen feet high with a huge window overlooking the street. Most of my staff had equally nice offices.

The federal agency for which I work is too large for our headquarters, so we've leased a couple of satellite buildings for the past decade. Now they're consolidating the satellites into one new building and decided that my shop should move as well. Last week involved packing up everything while continuing our operation since we can't legally shut down. They moved all our stuff to the new building this weekend and this morning was my first day in the new office, mostly spent unpacking. Ugh.

The new office is brand new and pretty nice, but much, much smaller and without a window. My staff has even smaller offices and some of them were distinctly unhappy. We also had to deal with the host of issues that arise when you're getting settled into a new workplace. So it was a stressful day that will lead into a stressful week, making it overall a hugely busy month.

Here's hoping I can take a breath during May.