Laura Crandall

Her Work: Waldorf School Director

“Sometimes I feel really cozy”

I ask Laura Crandall to tell me about her workspace. She says “My workspace history here has been pretty interesting I think.” She tells me about the odd structure of the offices when they moved into this building and the successful reorganizing. “I’ve been in every space that you could be in, in this office so that’s pretty interesting too that each time my job moved my office moved.” “This office we built not last summer but the summer before. And the sort of vision of it was, I wasn’t going to be in this office, but I had them do the windows at the top so that there could still be light coming in from this office into the other office and then I wanted the glass door as well for the same reasons because I felt like if everything was closed off it would just make everything really dark in the main office. So I actually designed this office and then I ended up in it a year after they built it. It’s yellow because I like yellow a lot. I only like yellow in my rooms I would never wear it, I wouldn’t have a yellow car I don’t like yellow anywhere else but I like it on the walls because it’s so dark here in the winter.”

I ask Ms. Crandall if she likes her workspace and how she feels working in it “I do feel pretty good. I like it. The lighting is probably what makes me the happiest. The thing that I don’t like is that it feels really limited with what I can do with it because I can’t configure the furniture in any other way than it is. I also feel, even though we’re in a big building we don’t have enough space. So this needs to be bigger, it couldn’t be bigger, so it’s difficult to have meetings. I can fit two more adults in here but if we don’t know each other well it can’t be more than two and even two feels cramped. I also sometimes don’t like the acoustics so well because it’s a little bit, it just seems like the sound sort of comes back at you in not a great way.” I do notice that the sound seems to bounce back at you in an odd way, almost an echo but not quite.

“There’s a fluorescent light up in the ceiling but I don’t use it because we don’t like fluorescent lights here and so I have these nice lamps with the paper shades. Around the holidays I put up a nice little string of blue lights so it feels sort of soft and cozy in here.” “Sometimes I feel really cozy because it’s sort of small and because of the lights and because of my heat and because I have a drawer full of food. It’s pretty comfortable, I’ll get my iPod and sometimes I’ll listen to music. But sometimes I feel like there’s a little rats nest in my brain that I can’t clear out and that’s probably the amount of different things I have to do if I have a lot of little tasky things to do. So it’s prioritizing which actually I’m very good at but that’s probably why I’m good at it because it drives me crazy.”  It sounds like everything functions well because she the fact that the little tasks bother he means that it gets handled accordingly.

I ask Ms. Crandall to describe the work environment that she feels she works best in and she says “space. Space is the biggest issue here and it always has been and I don’t see it getting any better because as we get bigger we will need more admin staff and right now it’s a total mystery to me as to where we’d put them.”

Laura Crandall tells me she doesn’t have much furniture or things up on the walls in her home so that it creates a lot of emptiness but there isn’t a lot of that in this office. She tells me “the office feels a little constricted and confusing.”  She tells me “I just can’t figure out how to make it work and how to get the right filing cabinets” and furniture etc.  She tells me that she likes “minimal furniture.” She tells me she doesn’t like having carpets and explains to me “One of my friends said that having a carpet is like wearing the same shirt for your whole life and I thought ‘that is really true’ and when you have all wood floors and you see the amount of dust that shows up after just a week on your floor and you think ‘that’s on the carpet.” “to me it’s dirty and that’s why I don’t like it.” She has a mental list of small things she doesn’t like about the space, like the venetian blinds, the fluorescent lights, and some nail holes that need to be filled in but she seems comfortable and determined to work on fixing the things she doesn’t like.

She tells me that the relationships with the employees is great, humorous, a lot of fun, and that they’ve built up a lot of trust between each other. “I should tell you about my snack drawer” she says. “I have in my second drawer there, which is almost my biggest drawer in my cabinet there is filled with food. In my top drawer I have chocolate. That’s one of the services that I provide for the teachers is they know where they can get some chocolate and that helps them a lot of the time.”

When I ask her to put her experience with her work into a few words she replies “Full. Loving. Beautiful. Heartfelt. And difficult.”

Nearing the end of our conversation I ask her if she has anything else to share about her job or her workspace and she says “gratitude for my job.” “It’s not just how I earn a living it’s a way of life. It just has provided me with so much inside and out and for my family.” “And my workspace I’ll keep working on.”