The Final Frontier

No, it's not space. It's the home office.

You know the place - You file things there. You pay bills there. You may even read your favorite-friend-in-Italy's blog there. What you hope NOT to do there is find a mountain of chaos, a degree of disorganization that causes you to think you will never dig yourself out of this infernal mess and find a bank statement ever again.

By now our apartment is well and truly on its way to becoming a home. A few rugs, a couple more cabinets and we will be pretty much there. Except for the office.

When we renovated this place, we cleverly carved a loft space out of the under-roof area above our bedroom. It was large. Much larger than our little 10x15 foot "office" in Washington. Ah, now we are set, we said. We have so much space that it will be very simple to organize ourselves and our work this time.

So we took our time, concentrating on the living areas of our home. After all, walls, floors and bathroom cabinets tend to take priority. I think I finally emptied the last box of my remains from the Verizon office last week. It only took me ten months. And why rush? After all, I'm retired.

But along the way, we realized that we were missing things. Like bills. Not only were we missing a lot of them, we didn't understand the ones we did see. So we were very happy when we received electric and water bills for 17 Euros. How cheap life is here in this little burg, we said to ourselves. And we laughed at the high cost of living in the big American city.

But one day other bills arrived. BIG bills. They were for water and electricity. They totalled more than 1,500 Euros together. (FYI, that's about $2,250.) We were perplexed. Why had no one sent us bills before this? And so began our adventure into the land of Italian utility billing.

Apparently we were unaware that we should have been calling the utility companies to tell them how much to bill us every month. THAT'S why the invoices they sent us were for 17 Euros. So now we had to pay approximately ten months - yes, almost a year - of electricity and water, all at once. How very interesting, we thought.

Not only that, but we hadn't even lived in the place until late March, and we were gone for a month over the summer. Hmmm. Seems our contractors, while working on the walls and floors, msot likely with the windows open, had been heating our apartment very nicely. Why be uncomfortably cold in February when someone else can pay the bill?

So Piero hoofed it down to the Assem office and started to figure out how we could arrange to be billed somewhat regularly so as to avoid these unpleasant surprises in the future. Meanwhile, it seemed that the garbage collection bills had been going to his parents all year, and we also needed to pay those. Interesting.

So, I wondered, when one moves to a new place, don't the utility companies normally welcome him or her with a marvelous information packet and regular monthly bills? Apparently not. But now that we have figured out how to set up the process, we should at least be able to plan to pay these nice companies so we will continue to have heat and water in our apartment.

But back to the office. How is it possible that I worked for a company for almost 28 years, and managed to keep my desk tidy and create a logical filing system, yet I look around at the piles of paper and unidentified boxes of stuff in here and think I'll never get through it all? I think the answer is sharing.

Once upon a time, my office was all mine. No overflowing cartons, no step machine, no dangling cables and no Cheetah Girls posters. It was simple and orderly. And now I am running out of time. I'm afraid my innate organizational desires will at some point propel me into the abyss and force me to uncover the horizontal surfaces that I know exist there. Until then, my improving yoga practice will help me deal with it. And IKEA sells great little boxes in a department called 'Casa in Ordine.' Go figure.

Ommmmmmmm