Brian's New Office... almost!

Brian's company is building a new office for the Phoenix branch, something I've been hearing about for months now. Brian's had a heavy hand in the whole thing, from picking the location to laying out the offices to getting bids for phone service. The warehouse will be three times as big as the location they have now, and I think the office space is expanding by even more than that. Even though everyone will be glad when the move is over, the whole thing has been pretty exciting. The other day the kids and I drove down to have lunch with Brian and go take a tour.

We got to drive straight into the warehouse to park. I don't know why, but I thought that was cool. :) The warehouse is too big for me to get it all in one shot, but here's most of it:




Brian showed us each room (I think this is the breakroom below, with freshly-laid tile) and the kids were excited about everything they saw. Even the bathrooms. But I didn't take pictures of those. :)

This is the new dispatch office, with a window leading to the warehouse. Not quite four years ago, Brian started as a dispatcher. Two years later he had worked his way up to Operations Manager. But not that I'm bragging on him. ;)

The highlight of the tour was Brian's new office. Check out those windows! This is slightly bigger than his old office, and has more in the window department too.

Thanks to a mistake by the builders, Brian's office is actually a little bit bigger than the GM's office. It was not supposed to be that way. As soon as Brian found out about it, he was going to have the builder fix it even though it meant moving a wall. His boss, ever the sport, said not to bother because he doesn't care. But he knows Brian feels badly, so he's been having fun teasing him about it. :)

Here, Brian is showing us how the warehouse is going to be divided and organized - also his arena.

Okay, here's the bonus. See the big bay doors here?

The warehouse has a total of 7 bay doors. The two on each end you can drive into the way we did with our van. The middle three, the closed doors in this picture, are deep bays for semis to back into. This is a feature their current warehouse doesn't have, so Brian had fun showing us this next part.

He had John pull on a chain to get this metal section to raise up.

Then he had John stand on it to try to get it to go back down again:

John wasn't heavy enough, so Brian had to help him with his foot. It went down FAST!!

John didn't mind though:

Ben tried to lift the panel too, but wasn't strong enough, so Brian and John took turns raising and lowering it over and over again. The kids all thought this was great. It took a little persuasion, but before we left we finally convinced Ben and Chris to get on it so they could ride it down too. Once they were there, they were feeling pretty brave!

And the other side...


Not as much fun. :)