22 April 2012 - The Cloakroom

I haven't generally given much thought to closets at work for, well, perhaps ever.  In the offices that I have worked in in the US, we generally had coat hooks or a small closet in the cubes or behind the doors of offices, so I didn't have to think about it.  I also had a coat hook in my office in Frankfurt.  Of course, when you were visiting someplace in any of these locations, there was always a coat room by reception, so that was nothing new.  But the situation is slightly different both in our office here in Moscow as well as in Kiev.  This may or may not be driven by necessity due to our use of open workspaces for most employees.

Now, having a coat closet or cloakroom is in and of itself nothing incredibly interesting, I will admit.  But what is kept in this space and how the space is used is perhaps a different matter.

The coatroom during the day

Our office area is designed with the offices arranged around the outside and then in the center section there is a swath of enclosed spaces, including two small conferences rooms, the room with the copier, a long galley kitchen area (yes, where the fruit man delivers the busy season fruit!), and the strange cloakroom/bathroom area.  Picture a narrow corridor accessible from the hallways on both ends with coatracks on one side and doors to the restrooms on the other side.  It is rather dimly lit, tends to be a bit stuffy and doesn't always smell very pleasant.  It is also very narrow - two adults cannot pass by without turning to their sides to scoot by.  Not a place that I suspect claustrophobic individuals would fancy.  Normally this shouldn't be an issue as it's not as if there should be a huge bathroom rush and coat rush at the same time.  But there are two other considerations in our office.

First, because the majority of our people work in open spaces, there aren't many places to make a private call.  There are notes posted that personal calls should be taken in the huddle rooms, but those are always full.  So you find people making calls in stairwells and, yes, in this dimly light narrow corridor.  I can imagine few worse places to make a call due to (recap) not-so-pleasant smelling, sounds of bathrooms in the distance, in the midst of traffic when someone else enters this area and it's dimness.

The coatroom at night

Second, we must address the issue of snow and shoes.  I have said a few times, while watching Russian women teetering on ridiculously high heels but nevertheless moving forward rapidly, that I could not cut it as a Russian woman - I just don't have the high heel gene.  Or, perhaps the case is that I don't have a gene that would ensure that I do not cause permanent damage to my ankles when one of those stilts gets caught between the cobblestones and I take a massive tumble.

Nevertheless, women are wearing high heeled shoes and boots even in the snow as well as some Uggs and other footwear designed for the extreme cold, snow or both.  So when the ladies get to the office, they exchange the boots for their office shoes.  The cloakroom is where this change takes place and this tends to take a bit more space than hanging up coats, so it can get a bit congested.  The wet boots also no doubt lend to the, um, scent of the room.  This also leads to the interesting contrast of the cloakroom during the day and at night.  During the day, it is just packed with boots and big coats.  During the night it is empty except for all the office shoes waiting to be claimed the next morning.  I find it all fascinating.

One other interesting thing in the cloakroom and in society in general is the sheer number of fur coats and fur trim.   My perspective on this is colored, as always, by my experience in the US.  Chicago knows cold weather for a couple days, but I always laughed at women on the commuter rail who showed up with their big mink coats as soon as the hint of chill hit.  Totally a status symbol - "Look at me, I've got a fur coat and I'm wearing it just to go to the office, from which you should assume that I have even better ones for evening wear."  I wanted to just say, "Oh, and P.S., you know that it adds more weight than the camera and it looks really ridiculous with your running shoes that you're wearing to the office, right?" (A friend of mine has a habit of making animal sounds when women walk by in fur coats, which I have to admit I find funny in a juvenile way.)  Aside from these ladies, though, I mostly saw furs worn to evening events where the mink went really well with black tie formality.

What seems different here is that nearly everyone seems to have a fur, not just those at the executive levels.  And there are so many different types of furs, both in style and in the actual fur.  Many of the furs are light or medium brown, reddish or gray.  Very few minks.  There are also some furs that have some type of pattern burned into them in some way, which was also a first for me.  And add to this that most of the fur trim on other coats is real fur rather than the faux fur I'm used to seeing in the US.  All in all, it has changed my perspective on fur as it really makes sense here with the extreme cold and isn't such a big "haves v. have nots" thing.  I'm still not planning on buying one of them as I am usually too hot even in my cashmere coat and especially in the big down coat I got for here.  I admit, though, that I have given serious consideration to a fur hat I've seen some women wearing that basically covers the head in what appear to be white or gray fur with some longer, darker fur sticking out that is just fascinating - hard to tell whether it's someone with crazy highlights or something else.  Maybe they will be on sale now that winter seems to be over....