Quiddities Dev, Inc.

We boxed up our things, vaccumed the floors, and awkwardly rolled the filing cabinets down the stairs. It’s been a week since we moved out of the Sash Mill and into NextSpace, the cutting-edge coworking space on Cooper Street in Downtown Santa Cruz.

If I said things weren’t stressful, I’d be lying. There are no more boxes to schlep or kitchen appliances to unpack. We’re still hunting the mess of one-way downtown streets every morning for a spot we can parallel-park into and fishing quarters out of our pockets. And if we cannot take advantage of the cheaper blue meters, we are forced to park at the orange ones, availing ourselves of the twent-five-cents-buys-you-thirty-minutes premium rate. Or dodge the meter maids.

While our suites in the Sash Mill were our domain, this is not so at NextSpace. We have our own office (which is pretty lush) in a fishbowl-format: open ceiling, walls of windows. Everybody can see and hear what everybody else is doing. This is true especially in the cafe area: an assimilation of sink-into chairs and sofas, attractive coffee tables replete with magazines, plenty of places to plug in your laptop…and it’s all right next to the kitchen, where us Nexters are constantly filing in and out to replenish our coffee mugs.

Since everything is shared, we end up running into each other a lot. Our friends at Santa Cruz Design and Innovation Center are right next door. 12seconds is down the hall. You can meet up with your buddies in your room, then go to the common area to kick it, or head further down for snacks.

It’s like a geeky frat house.

(On that note, there’s even a stash of grown-up drinks hidden away in the kitchen. Naturally, this is just in case the Nexters need to cut loose and party. After work, of course.)

Lulu’s at the Octagon is right across the street. This makes for a pleasant diversion–which is excellent, especially if you find yourself stuck doing work at NextSpace until the wee hours. Whatever you’re in the mood to eat at lunch, it’s probably not more than three blocks away. And though sometimes you can hear the residentially challenged Santa Cruzians hollering at each other from the street, usually, its the tunes of the musicians that float up through the windows.

Leaving the Sash Mill meant sacrificing a lot. Parking, privacy, total control over our domain, for instance. Now that the nerve-wracking move is over and we’re starting to get grooves in our chairs again, I think we can all agree that we sacrificed something to get something better. It’s scary at first to be so exposed, and we’re definitely not accustomed to being interrupted in our office because we have to chat with the people we haven’t met yet. That sort of stuff we reserved for the Geek Dinners or the BarCamps or the other various networking events. We waited ’till then to bounce our ideas off each other and went back to our offices at the end of the day to mull things over.

The more comfortable we get here, the more pervasive that fuzzy networking feeling gets. It will get easier as we learn to mix socializing with working–a skill that most of the Nexters already posess. Listen in on a few conversations and you’ll get an idea of how dynamic the activity is. (You don’t really have a choice; you eavesdrop whether you like it or not.) Perhaps it’s best that we all got packed into a second-story coworking space Downtown. Personally, I like it better already.