Corner Office
Wiki defines a corner office “. . . an office that is located in the corner of a building. Corner offices are considered desirable because they have windows on two exterior walls, as opposed to a typical office with only one window or none at all (windowless offices occupying a corner of a building are therefore not typically considered “corner offices”). As corner offices are often given to the most senior executives, the term primarily refers to top management positions.” I like to think of myself as the top Snowbird in my Bavarian neighborhood and therefore entitled to the corner office. I have a kitchen corner office with a third-floor view of what used to be a village wall and gate a millennium ago. Now it is simply an intersection with a red/green light and crosswalk.
From my Bavarian corner office, I see teachers taking kiddies for walks rain or shine with their yellow reflective vests. In the chestnut tree alley rimming the ancient town, fresh flower plantings are watered, and the street cleaner keeps everything tidy. There are many more views of hundreds of bikers taking an annual tour of Bavaria, farmers towing pooh-pooh tanks behind their tractors on the way to their fields to spread natural fertilizers, church and veteran parades with marching bands, and occasional cars screeching by pretending to being in an inner-city Monaco Formula-1 rally.
My winter nesting grounds in Florida also includes a very different kind of corner office — not included in the Wiki definition. There, the office is about a meter above sea level in the aft starboard corner of my sailboat. The views are spectacularly different. A momentary rainbow appears encircling the marina, duckies scrounging for food, the US Coast Guarding headed for the fuel dock, and much more. Looking up at the sky every few minutes earns a glimpse of a flock of terns from a nearby covered-roof dock, herons waiting patiently on pilings for their next meal, high above an osprey eats his dinner on an FM antenna atop a mast, and at sea level, kayakers, paddle boarders, mega yachts, graceful sailboats, and noisy power boats drive by. When nighttime approaches the moon rises and a hemisphere of stars and planets appear, which we have fun tracking with a old-fashioned planimeter.
There is also a cosmic difference between my summer and winter corner offices. At night, in my Bavarian office I can see the North Star, Polaris. In Bavaria we are at 48 degrees North Latitude, while we are only at 27 degrees North Latitude in Florida and Polaris is totally hidden.
Life is good in both my corner offices.
