Our Big Office Move

     The photo shows my Forest Service Draughting Office, circa 1991, before it was all packed away ready for the move to our new office.

    In the last half of October of 1991, the our Forest District was preparing to make a move into a new building that the Provincial Government had contracted to house our growing numbers of employees (39).  The new building seemed like a huge complex, considering that when I started working for the Forest Service in 1980, we just had a small office building with only about eight of us working there.

    As our staff grew, we moved to a larger office that was part of the then newly constructed Village of McBride Office Complex that had been built in 1981.   Ten years later, that office space was set to burst at the seams because of our growing number of employees, that had increased into the upper twenties.  Also, Forestry’s ten year lease for the space with the Village had expired, so we were off to work in the newly constructed Ministry of Forests building located at the end of the Frontage Road across Highway 16, west of Main Street. 

    The spacious new building consisted of a handful of enclosed offices for Management, and Resource Officers, and an open area for workspace delineated by five foot high moveable partitions, for us peons.  There was also a lunch room, a “Board Room for meetings, and a warehouse for all of the fire fighting equipment which included a much needed forklift.  There was a separate building to house things like gasoline and other fuels.

    Of course, the whole forestry staff was eager to make the move into our “new digs,” but the move kept being put off.  Finally, a date for our move was set for Monday, October 28th, so everyone spent the Friday before, dismantling and boxing up all of their office supplies.

    Packing up everything in my Draughting/Mapping area, was particularly difficult, because of all the filing cabinets of air photos, and the cabinets and hangers full of all of the many maps of our district, as well as  the large and specialized large-format printers for those maps, a huge light table, and a projector for enlarging the maps.  There was also the big drawing table set up with its draughting attachments, but by the end of Friday, I had managed to dismantle, organize and gather all of the furniture, cabinets, and equipment together on the floor, surrounded by the many boxes full of all of the other items I used in my job.

    The whole staff also had everything organized and ready to move, when our office received word from BCBC (the Provincial agency in charge of buildings) that permission to move had been denied, and would not be approved, until the furnace in the new building was hooked up and working, (it was just about November, after all.)

    This announcement left our whole forestry staff flummoxed and wondering about what we were going to do about our work, during the following week, since everything we used to do our job was in boxes, and we had not been given any date as to when we would be able make to make the move.  Finally, a new move date was set for Wednesday, October 30th, so until then, all of us pretty much twiddled our thumbs for three whole work days, unable to do our work because everything we used had been packed away in boxes.

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