Tales From the NYRA Office, Episode 1

Yesterday I went into our office for the first time. We rent a room inside the office of Common Cause on the 9th floor of 1133 19th St, NW in downtown Washington, DC. Right by the Farragut North metro stop. We are just over a block from the famous K Street where all the DC bigwigs, lobbyists and advocacy groups set up shop. Now NYRA has joined their ranks.

We don’t yet have the computers we need for the office so I just went in yesterday to set up furniture and make arrangements with the Common Cause folks. No one from Mobilizing America’s Youth was around, they’ll be in California till late January, so Kim, the Common Cause office manager, showed me NYRA’s room. The previous occupant seems to have just been one guy with a large desk and a chair. A computer was set up when I first arrived, but they came to take it away. Just a few odds & ends were left.

In the odds and ends I came across an action figure who I have promoted to status of official NYRA Office Mascot. He hasn’t been named yet, perhaps the forums can start a naming contest.

I needed more furniture though since I want to squeeze three people into that office. All day while I was working on moving stuff people kept passing by saying there is no way I’ll fit three people in there, hehe. But it isn’t hard to do if you don’t mind close quarters. Kim directed me to a room where they keep all their excess furniture and said I could take what I want from there. The room was piled to the ceiling with filing cabinets and shelves and such. You couldn’t take a step inside the room before facing a solid wall of furniture.

Unfortunately the room didn’t have any good desks of a suitable size for our office. Especially with the big desk that was in there currently. The only thing in that room that worked for us was a book shelf… and that was way in the back corner. So I played a massively scaled game of Tetris moving these blocks of filing cabinets up down and around to make room for me to reach the book shelf and then extract it. At long last it was ours:

Good thing too, since I brought some books:

I brought with me a few youth rights posters to add some decoration to the otherwise drab office. Some great ones from KRATZA in Germany and Votes at 16 in the UK. Better yet I finally found a use for one of those hundreds of wrist bands I have sitting around:

I figured the big desk was large enough we could put two people at it. So I just needed another desk to house our third dutiful NYRA worker. Nothing in the big storage room worked, but I spotted a small gray desk in another room that didn’t seem to be in use. I asked and was granted permission to take it for our own nefarious ends. So lets give a hearty NYRA welcome to Desk#2:

Then I put some books in the shelf (I have more at home)

and then my damn camera broke. I don’t know what the deal is, it just won’t take more pictures. But of course since the screen hasn’t been working for months I can’t tell what the deal is. I put more posters up, and put our name out front in the little name-putter-inner thingy.

We just need some computers now so we can actually use the office. I’m working on that now. I picked up two monitors today and might pick a full computer up tonight (an old one though).

As I said in the last entry, this is NYRA’s home. We need to make it look more like us, all of us. So we are definitely in need of more decorations from all the membership. If you have a scrap of something from your chapter, or just from you as a NYRA member that you think would look splendid up on our wall, please send it in!

Mail stuff to:
National Youth Rights Association
1133 19th St, NW
Washington, DC 20036