Every so often the powers that be™ decide that a reorganization would be a good idea, and that some people should change offices. A few years back this was stimulated by one group of people vacating some desirable office space in the main building (they were ordered to relocate to Crystal City by even higher powers that be™) and the decision to occupy that space set off a domino effect wherein our group made a “land grab” for some extra space, in which we secured offices with windows (yay!) while hanging on to the offices we we already occupying.

We needed the space, too, because, we were getting set to hire two new employees and were also running out of storage space. But storage space is a low priority in the eyes of the beancounters, so you can’t use that need to justify being assigned new space, and can’t fully depend on it to defend space you already have, especially when it’s empty space, for equipment you are planning to buy (logic is a puny weapon against Bureaucracy-Man, and the future is a myth, since it can’t be documented). And since we knew that somebody would do the math (X number of people left, so there must be some empty office space around here) we had to protect and defend the extra space somehow. That’s where Tuttle came in. The empty office would belong to Tuttle.

Jonathan Tuttle is from an episode of M*A*S*H, and is doubly fictitious — within the TV story, he’s also a made-up character, which was a criterion I used in selecting the name. (Another name that would fit this requirement was George Kaplan, from North by Northwest, but we already had someone with that name at work!) Much like the TV episode, the idea was that if anyone asked, one could always come up with an excuse for Tuttle not being around (“He’s in the lab,” “He’s gone up to Building 1,” or even “He’s at a conference/on vacation this week.”)

Tuttle’s office started out as a spare office, complete with a desk and computer and our networked printer, with office supplies and some other minor items on the shelves but the furniture was eventually moved out for someone to use and was replaced with heavy-duty shelving. To keep up appearances, I took a picture of the office and edited it so I could place it in the door’s window and have it look like it was still an office when the door was closed.

And that’s what you see here — a photo in the window. That’s a printer and an old iMac on a table, but what’s really in the office is a bunch of shelving with equipment and supplies. And the printer — we still use it for that. A number of people have been fooled into thinking it’s an office. That red dot on the door trim was a mark left by some beancounter marking it as occupied office space. The equipment staging area (we don’t call it storage) next door, which was never camouflaged, lacks that mark.