Dad's Ugliest Office

A year after my dad retired at 87 due to encroaching dementia and blindness, his office remained untouched.  Kim, his granddaughter, who designs offices for a living, saw an ad in one of her office design magazines for an Ugliest Office competition.  The winner would get an office makeover including all new office furniture.

         “We should enter Grandpa’s office,” Kim said, adding confidently, “He could win.”  The competition involved sending photos and then having a company rep pay an office visit.

         “This is the real thing,” said the company rep walking into his office the day of the visit.  “A lot of people made a mess of their offices, but you could tell it was only for the competition.  This office is the real deal,” she uttered eyeing the fly paper hanging from the ceiling with the accumulated exoskeletons of a decade’s worth of dead flies.  Although Dad was the owner of the business, his office was humble and had no window that could open into which a screen could be inserted.  So, on hot days, he would simply open the door to the outside, flies and all.  Fly paper solved the problem.

         “You can’t make this stuff up,” she said looking at the array of utensils strung from the ceiling strategically hung to hover directly over Dad’s desk.  As glaucoma and macular degeneration claimed his eyesight, stringing up his most important tools saved him the frustration of trying to fish out those items on his desk. Four strings hung from the ceiling: a pencil, a magnifying glass, a fork, and the TV remote.  They had been there so long that we kids didn’t even notice anymore and were oblivious to how they might look to a first-time visitor.

         Then she turned her gaze to an inside door with somewhere between 70 to 80 nails on it.   On each hung a different key, labeled with black marker in large letters.  Aesthetically, it stung the eyes.  “What up with that?” she asked.  It was his way of keeping track of all the keys and making sure if he wasn’t there, whoever needed one, would have it.

         Dried, half-eaten plates of food and petrified donuts occupied his desk reminiscent of the many times he would sit down to eat and then get called away.

         Golf magazines dating back 30 years ago towered in stacks against his back wall because “You never know when you’ll need one.”  No, you couldn’t make this stuff up.

         The day Dad was announced the winner of The Ugliest Office, we kids agreed we wanted readers to know Dad’s office more than anything else, signified what was important to him. 

The fly paper?  Sure, he could have replaced his office window with one with a screen. But he didn’t.  By his self-imposed austerity, he had supported a wife and seven children, and had made sure each child went to college, something he hadn’t been able to do.  

The utensils strung from the ceiling? Sure, he could have retired years earlier when his sight began to fail. But he didn’t. By innovating, he stayed productive well into his eighties.

           The accumulation of decades of golf magazines? In those same decades, Dad brought many golf firsts to our valley: he was the first to teach kids to golf and host a peewee tournament; first to teach women and start a women’s league; first to host free team practices as the peewees grew up, went to high school and college and started golf teams. 

This was the story that needed to be told: This is the office of a humble, creative man who provided for his family, found ways to stay productive when others would have quit, and whose innovations always included how other people’s lives were made better.