The first year and a half that I worked at Kawasaki I worked in a room without windows. It was a small meeting room about the size of a walk-in closet in the center of the second floor, mainly for doing short one-on-one meetings with vendors that came in. I took it over for 18 months, and in that time I never saw the sky unless it was lunchtime.
It was kind of a reminder of when I worked at the bottling warehouse of Glen Ellen Winery years ago in the 80’s. Dark when you come in to work in the morning, dark when you leave at night, and no windows to watch the transition.
Working without windows didn’t bother me much at the time, but when I moved to my current office I was surprised how much difference a window makes.
My current office is a pretty nice setup. I’m on the fourth floor, and my office is made up of two teaching classrooms. The door opens to a medium-sized room that I use for group lessons, and then there is another door at the back of that room that is my office. I use this “back office” for most of my classes, which are one-on-one. The office in the back is about triple the size of the windowless room on the second floor and almost the same size of the VP’s office on the top floor. So no complaints about the size.
But the nicest part of the office is that there are two tall windows. They are almost floor to ceiling, and they provide lots of sunlight and blue sky. From the fourth floor they open onto the roof of the adjacent warehouse, but beyond the roof is just blue sky and clouds. It is on the Kansai airport and Kobe airport approach pattern, so in the distance I can see planes silently coming and going. In the morning the sun comes up and casts a golden light across the south side of the room, and when it catches the clouds against the blue sky it is pretty spectacular.
During the day the clouds drift by, and for some reason it always reminds me of the view we enjoyed during our stay on Santorini in the Greek islands. The benefit is that it takes just a glance out the windows to bring me back to lounging on our balcony overlooking the caldera of Santorini, or watching a plane fly across the sky to send my mind ahead to our next trip overseas.
It’s a pretty good working environment.
For the last few years it has been a private office, too, so I’m getting a little spoiled. In the future if I need to work in a shared office it will be a tough transition to make.
