The Company Move - Part 3

Time passes.

Responses to questions about the move are few and far between.

Equipment begins to arrive. We find places to stash it. Routers, switches, a KVM for the new lab, 19 enclosed racks, power strips, and huge new servers are now sitting all over our building, waiting for a home.

People start digging through boxes for items they need. Two people who went on long vacations and expected to come back to a new building have to set their computers back up in their old locations.

March blows in. We are told that we will be "GO" to move on March 20th. Access to the building is just waiting on one more signature.

At this point I have to speculate. We are told that the hold up is that the owner of the building has to sign something to let Sun sub-let the 7th floor to us. Sun has no employees at all in this building, just a big sign on the outside, but it has managed to sub-let the first six floors. My theory is that, somehow, Sun screwed over or otherwise pissed off the building owner while sub-letting the first six floor because the owner is dragging his feet big time. The first agreement of intent needs the signature of the building owner, but if the owner ignores it, the agreement will be considered signed after thirty days. The clock on that started running on March 1st.

On March 30, the agreement of intent is considered signed. Now we can move onto the details of the lease.

However, it is now April 1st and our own lease on the building we are in has expired. We are now paying month-to-month which, according to our agreement with the landlord, means paying DOUBLE our current rate per square foot. Smithers goes to "negotiate" with out landlord to try and get that number reduced. Hah. I can't imagine what a landlord with seven empty buildings can see as the advantage to lowering the income he is getting. Still, through some inducement, he gets them to change it to a day-by-day lease, so we have an incentive to get out sooner, but the price is the same.

And things grind on at the new building. The owner is coming up with all sorts of restrictions and such to add to our lease agreement. We have to change back any construction we do on our floor when we leave. We cannot change the air conditioning. We can change the air condition (because it turns out Sun owns the A/C units) but we have to put back all the ducting as it was when we leave. We have to submit plan and permits for all of the work we want to do (but we don't have access to the building yet!) We cannot have a floor loading of greater than 50 pounds per square foot. This technically means that I, and some of my co-workers, will not be allowed to come to work. Others will merely forbidden to stand on one foot.

And these are only the items that made it to me and I am not plugged into the process at all.

Meanwhile the contractors are pissed at us, and justifiably so. We promised them work, made them accommodate our schedules, and now, two months after our proposed start date, we are still stringing them along without paying them a red cent.

On or about April 13th, Smithers, under heavy pressure from his boss and the CEO to finish up this move, decides he needs a plan B.