We’ve just finished moving our U.S. office from the East Bay into San Francisco. So long Pleasanton — I won’t miss that grueling commute for one nanosecond. 

While our new office is not exactly in downtown SF with all its fancy glass facades and Jamba Juices on every corner, we do enjoy a “lively” view of Highway 101 as traffic chugs north and south in a relentless stream of metal and fumes. Day and night, it never stops and sheer volume of cars, trucks and coaches passing is incredible. I conclude that our planet is doomed…

When your company is moving its office, I’ve found that the things you dread most go pretty smoothly and the stuff that should be a picnic turns out to be a pain in the ****. For example, moving heavy wooden office furniture from the 4th floor of a corporate office in Pleasanton with unbelievably pernickety building managers would seem to be a recipe for disaster. However, we got hold of a great family owned moving company called Waters Moving & Storage who made the whole teardown and transport plain sailing.

Anything destined for storage got a yellow sticker and items for the new office got a purple sticker — that bit couldn’t be easier except for my agonizing over what furniture should be voted off the island. It took a full Saturday to complete the move, but eventually all the popular furniture wound up in the new office, neatly assembled and exactly where it ought to be. Other junk and accumulated furniture was offloaded into a nearby storage facility.

A lick of paint on the walls, some Pledge to get the forty sets of hand prints off the table tops, and I was ready to kick back and have a beer. Not much more to it, really — just get the phone lines installed and high speed internet access — should be piece of cake. No, no, no…

Enter Comcast Business Class with their digital phone service that sounds great until the technician informs you that it requires a wall mounted battery pack the size of a family suitcase in your office. Service is guaranteed to the office point of entry but not to the actual desks(!), and the famous line “you’ll need a contract technician for that” makes the blood run cold. Just to seal the gloom, I’m told that “those fancy Mitel IP phones you have probably won’t work with our VoIP service either, sir.” Wonderful. Get out.

AT&T Small Business fared little better with all their ’small business saver’ bundles <wry smile>, long distance plans, and phone jack installation fees. I was bombarded with a mish-mash of voice services loosely mixed together — skip the eye-rolling complexity; all I want is a few phone and fax lines, people! “We can run DSL over your fax line, attach a wireless router to the modem, and you’ll just troubleshoot it yourself, right?” Nope. I’m an AT&T DSL user at home and that service goes south with jaw clenching regularity. Get out.

I didn’t really tell anyone to get out (that would just be rude) but the whole experience was a bit like going to the dentist — painful, expensive, but necessary. We finally went with AT&T for basic phone service and Comcast for cable internet service. I’ve learned that you do need to watch out for the little ‘gotchas’ when moving office; often the bigger jobs get done with brute force and many hands on deck, but installing basic telecommunications services can be agonizing.

We should be all moved in by Monday, with just a few loose ends to tie up. At this stage in the week, I’m actually reluctant to fetch the mailbox key in case I lose my afternoon “troubleshooting” it!