It’s 8:00 am. Time to wake up. Yeah yeah, I know – I’ve got it easy. I have a five minute commute to the RepairQ office, which is located near the heart of midtown Tulsa on a street lovingly dubbed by Tulsan’s as “Cherry Street”. Walking through the front doors (after finding a spot in our narrow-spaced, shared parking lot, I am greeted by the boisterous front desk attendant of our building, Charlene. She works for the high-end salon that we share a building with. After a passing greeting, I step through the glass door that leads into the bottom half of the RepairQ office.

The front room is outfitted for customer support and our Tulsa development staff, with Mac computers and extra monitors lining the workspaces. Each member has a setup of two monitors and is equipped with a hefty, over-the-ear headset so they won’t have to listen to me discuss things loudly in the next room with the marketing or executive teams. I greet the team cheerfully as I pass through the room, and am typically responded to with various grumbles like “It’s too early for this” or “For the last time, please stop talking to me before 9AM”.

As I slide a massive wooden barn door out of the way to gain entry to the marketing room, I am greeted by my bubbly teammate, Chelsea Williams, the Senior Graphic Designer at RepairQ. I plop down in my comfortable ergonomic rolly-chair and settle in for a long workday. The walls are painted a pale green color, and reflect the overhead soft white lights to create a calm, soothing atmosphere. Our room would best be described as eclectically artistic, with random artifacts littering the shelves, like a typewriter from the 1950’s, an original Macintosh computer, a hotdog hat, and an farcical imitation of Jackson Pollock painting done by someone’s kid.

There are also pictures of team members, silly awards, phone numbers, brand standard fonts and colors, and a torn-in-half phone book from our former Marketing Director (we bet him lunch he couldn’t rip it in half) hanging up on our walls. Its as big as the previously mentioned room, but for some reason, only Chelsea and I, and sometimes our boss James, occupy its space (as opposed to the seven members on the opposite side of the wall). Its cozy.

I grab my black notebook, which I take with me everywhere, and review my notes from the previous day. Then, I go through the typical morning routine, check my email, review any assignments that may be falling by the wayside, and wait for James, our direct supervisor, to drop in for our daily morning standup meeting. We will take a look at any outstanding projects that need attention, talk about upcoming UI updates, and discuss any major communications that need to be deployed to better engage with our customer base. We also use this time to schedule any meetings we may need with other departments, which is generally comprised of executive meetings with the development team.

That’s one of the endearing things about working at RepairQ. Even though the Tulsa office is relatively small, with approximately eleven in-office employees, we have double that working remotely solely on RepairQ. This can make communication and project direction a bit complicated when the individuals involved in the success of a project aren’t physically around for meetings and brainstorming sessions, so as you can easily imagine, we have quite a few teleconference and screen-sharing meetings via our technological lifeline, the internet.

After setting out a rough plan for the day within our team, we set to work on fulfilling our tasks. For me, that typically means scouring the dredges of the internet to find content for our social media accounts. Then, most likely, the marketing team will sit in on a sales demo, or have a meeting to discuss a specific project more in depth. Currently, that project that we are focusing heavily on is a mindblowing UI overhaul for the RepairQ software.

Noon… Lunchtime! We typically either bring our lunches from home or walk across the street to Reasors, a local grocery chain, and when I say “we”, I mean Josh, our web developer, and myself. They have the best chili in town, which helps make a cold, blustery day a bit more bearable. After enjoying my chili, I sit back down and finish out my day with meetings or other marketing related tasks. Once I have the desire to take a break, I meander out through the north side of our room, which leads to a staircase that takes you upstairs.

Once up the stairs, it opens up to display several different offices: an architect firm occupies one, the others are tended by a team of casino specialists and tech gurus. Wandering further down the corridor, I am greeted by a common area that has plush leather couches, a big screen TV, and various snack-type foods shored up in round, plastic dispensers. After a handful of granola or goldfish, I stretch a bit, and then head back to my office to wind things down.

Five o’clock rolls around eventually, we say our goodbyes and head home to our loved ones. Until the next morning where I clamber out of bed to do it all again. I do really look forward to Fridays though, because James brings us all donuts, churros, sausage rolls, or some other confectionary delight that makes working here a bit more awesome.