Colorful

[legalmoose]

I was going to post this as a response to this post of benton's, but realized it was going to be a tad too long, so here we go.

At my last Big Government Agency™ I had the privilege of going out to visit some of our field offices on occasion, usually when they'd screwed something or another up. I was out visiting one in 2002 or so which had a monumental screw-up, and was there for a couple weeks over several months. Over that time we (from HQ) noticed that the first floor (of three) had a definite theme going on: Purple.

It seems that at some point the first floor had been occupied by some other agency, and when they moved out, for security reasons, rather than let in another tenant HQ allowed this office to occupy the full first floor as well as the upper two. It was way more space than they needed, but they got it. The Contracting Officer was in charge of renovating the newly acquired space and her favorite color in all the world was purple.

They had royal purple carpet in most of the offices;

They had that sort of indistinct "doesn't show dirt" carpet in the common areas, but the dominant color was definitely purple;

Many of the chairs (that weren't dragged down from other floors) were also purple;

They had interior windows in some of the offices which needed venetian blinds to cover them - a sort of burgundy purple;

She waited until the acting head-of-the-office was out and then just had to get the acting person to sign off on a purchase order for wall paper right then! - light lavender;

You know those white-with-black-streaks tile/linoleum that's used in office floors? One of my HQ co-workers and I were in the kitchen area on the first floor and for some reason were trying to get under a table to get at some equipment when she looks at me and says, "Moose, take a look at the floor." I did, and by gosh, the 'black' on the tiles was actually a very, very dark purple.

It was quite fun getting the full story out of the folks who were left in the office. While we were there the Contracting Officer was allowed to retire (for reasons other than her decorating skills), so folks were happy to spill the beans about stuff like the wallpaper once she was gone.

Comments

[fj.livejournal.com]

Color theory says that while blue rooms makes people feel colder, and orange and red warmer, purple has the effect that 10% of the pople love it, 80% report nothing, and the rest gets suicidal after prolonged exposure.