A characteristic of my job as an auditor and consultant was not to have any fixed abode in the work place. I had no ‘personal’ office space. To save costs and maximise space occupation, the company I was employed by had opted for “hot desking”, a space management policy in fashion in consulting businesses. “Hot desking” means that I had to book a desk for the day whenever I was back in the office between two secondments. I was forever on corporate projects lasting no more than a couple of weeks, sometimes recurrently each year, sometimes for a single stay. I must have visited hundreds of offices in at least ten countries in Western Europe and North America. Each time, I would adopt the same routine: once led in the allocated room - at best a roomy meeting room with natural light, at worst a blind closet of a room - choosing a spot which would become my ground base for the time of the project, close to a connected phone line and a socket to connect my computer, walking around the premises to locate the toilets and the floor kitchen, and finally organising the stationery I would bring with me in my audit bag. The audit bag was a peculiar piece of fine leather goods. Looking disturbingly like a visiting doctor’s bag, in bright orange leather, it was distributed to each consultant as a welcome gift to transport on secondments the professional paraphernalia required on the job. With multiple pockets, it ended up being filled with diverse and sometimes surprising items that would qualify as personal belongings. In a way, this bag was a portable extension of my personal space. I remember discarding it after a few years, as a sign of growing confidence, and exchanging it for a customised bag I had carefully chosen to match professional requirements - mainly that it looked professional enough - and personal taste - light, conveniently roomy and aesthetically pleasing.

It would take me a day or two to settle, identifying the different moving patterns I would follow: from the room I had been assigned, to the chief accountant office, the receivables department, treasury, legal department, the toilets, the cafeteria or next door café, the photocopy machine, the coffee and vending machines. As I was getting familiar with the geography of space, I would also focus on identifying the rhythms of the working community: the time they would arrive in the morning and leave in the evening, the time they would break for lunch, whether they ate at their desks or in the cafeteria or floor kitchen, whether and how often they would take coffee breaks during the day. Once I had identified the geography and the sociology of the place, I would settle and feel more at ease with the people I was interacting with and ended up almost feeling ‘at home’.