Throwback Thursday - How to "manage" an "office"

I've written a little here about our time living overseas.  Never in my life had I "managed" an "office," so when the director said to me, "How do you feel about office work?" I was imagining things like copying, collating, stapling, and whatnot.

"Whatnot" was definitely the most accurate description of what my job as the "office manager" in the shipyard would involve.

On any given day, my duties would include the following:
-filing the proper permits with the shipyard to allow welding onboard the ship
-taking new team members and visitors to get IDs made so they could gain access to the shipyard
-walking to and from the ship to deliver messages to people, since we didn't have walkie talkies and only a few people had cell phones
-answering the phone (totally stressful, given that people didn't always speak English)
-shaking the ink cartridge on the printer to get that one.last.drop of ink
-wandering around the warehouse trying to inventory things that were arriving from our home base in Germany
-trying to hunt down random things like 1/4 inch steel plates and solid hardwood timber from local vendors
-handing out money from the oh-so-secure metal box we kept in a cupboard in plain view
-making coffee (which in itself was a riot, since the coffee grounds we could get locally were for TURKISH style coffee, which is meant to just sit in the bottom of a hot cup of water, and you sip the water off the top, yet I was trying to brew normal style coffee in a coffee pot... so, it tasted nasty.  But we all still drank it, haha.)
-taking notes during meetings between the shipyard execs and our team leaders, also known as the meetings during which we asked when they would finish the job and they would reply "Soon!" {which sort of made it feel like they'd actually been reading the New Testaments we were distributing around town, haha... get it?  That's a Jesus reference.}
-finding accommodations for visiting work teams and new team members


Let's talk about the last item for a minute.


Imagine that you have people coming from all different countries around the world, to work on a ship for differing periods of time.  These people are all ages, from all walks of life, and the only thing they have in common is that they love Jesus.

And now they get to be roommates.

That meant that on any given day, it was my job to figure out whether the new, 65 year old Aussie deckie was going to bunk with the 22 year old Dutch electrician, the 31 year old Danish drafter, or the 19 year old American cabinetmaker.

**Insert one very complicated Excel spreadsheet and a whole lotta STRESS here** 

Age wasn't always a good "common denominator," believe it or not.  Some of the happiest roomies were the ones with the most years in between their birthdays. 

In the end, I found that "attention to personal hygiene" became one of the biggest determiners in whether or not the roommates were a match made in short term missions heaven or not.  Two utterly different people could cohabitate happily in filth, while two people with similar ages, cultural backgrounds, or professions would spend weeks begrudging each other if their personal definitions of "clean" weren't copacetic.  Of course, we couldn't very well put "On a scale of 1 to 10, how little attention to detail do you give when bathing?" on the application form, so instead, it was a trial and error experience every time.

And on that note, I became very glad, very quickly, that my job was limited to ASSIGNING the roommates... and it was the HR guy's job to be in charge of LISTENING to the roommates when such issues as "his side of the room smells of rotten Finnish cheese" came up.  :)

Me and the rest of the fabu office team