It’s not often you get to legitimately use the “c word” without offending people, so for the sake of a good laugh, which I think a lot of us might need right now, I think it would be remiss of me not to.
Hello. My name is John. I am the owner of tuesday coworking. It’s a coworking space in Berlin.
10 years ago, on Tuesday (hooray!), 10 May 2016, myself and my friend, Monika, decided to open a small coworking space in Schöneberg. That’s where everything began. At the start, in its first year, when we had just 16 desks (for reference we now have around 130), I never really saw it turning into what it has become. From scrubbing the toilet floors on a Saturday morning to now having a network(!) of coworking spaces with staff and a cleaning crew, it’s kind of incredible to think that what in many ways started as a fun experiment has become this big hulking professional outfit. Despite that, though, I like to think that at our core, we’re still the same small familiar space trying to make everyone’s lives a bit easier and a bit more enjoyable.
But it’s not the walls and the desks that you’ll remember. It’s the people and the connections you make. tuesday is of course nothing without you, the members. One of the things I recall that still touches my heart was how you, the members, during Covid, still paid the membership fees, but you stayed home. You knew that tuesday needed to survive and you helped us do that because it meant something to you. The vast majority of our members remained members, but didn’t come to the spaces. And that’s what got tuesday through pandemic. So not only am I eternally grateful to you for that, but it also shows that the space and the people of the space mean something to each other. Like, where would we be without getting entangled in controversy at Igor’s Discussion Experiments? Or getting our bellies filled at Valeria’s pot luck dinners? Or getting “merry” on Natalie’s garden mint mojitos?
Or even without the other memories of having some famous musicians come perform at our Chandelier Sessions at Bundesallee. One of them coming by chance on my wife’s birthday, who incidentally, I met at one of our film nights at Feurigstrasse. My wife, that is, not the musician.
So these are the things that I remember when I look back at 10 years of tuesday. There are of course more negative moments like water damage and break-ins, which thankfully I don’t dwell on, and then there are just the funnier moments, like when a nudist rented one of our meeting rooms at Düsseldorfer Strasse and was, at one stage, walking down the corridors completely naked. When I phoned him later to ask what he was doing: “Accounting”! Or that other time when a rogue “c” slipped into one of our marketing texts announcing that we were offering a “10% discocunt”. Yes, it’s been a rollercoaster.
A quick note of thanks to tuesday’s fantastic team down the years of Ambre, Benedita, Janae, Leon, Olesia, Sophie, all the interns, and more recently Laura, Maike, Muhamet & Valeria for helping tuesday along the way. tuesday as it is today wouldn’t have been possible without you.
And finally my thanks to all of our members. I’m not sure of the total member count over all time, but it must be close to 2,000 by now. To each and every one of you, regardless if you stayed for just a day or for years, thank you for being a tuesdayer.
