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May 21, 2004

:: office space ::

Despite the annoyances inherent in working on a contract at a major corporation(not being able to get a security card and therefore being forced to wait in the eighth floor lobby like a dog out in the rain until some more legitimate employee happens along to let me in; sitting in a half-height admin's cube in the middle of a high-traffic area between two conference rooms, where there's never ever any hope of privacy or quiet and everyone in the office gets every possible chance to examine your personal belongings, leading them to ask ridiculous questions like, "how come your iPod is so fat?" (it's got a lot of glam rock on it. it got into the cat food last night. i dunno, i've been thinking about putting it on Atkins); being forced to wear real actual clothing every single day - and shoes, too! no flip-flops!), I wouldn't want to give the impression that it's no fun around here. Nosiree. We've got plenty to keep us amazed, amused and entertained. These are a few of my favorite things:

Office Signage
I've grown accustomed, not to say totally immune, to the usual doofy signage one finds around these kinds of places. You know the ones: "Hot water is hot!", "Your mother doesn't work here" and so forth. Surprisingly, they don't have those here. Instead, we have a fine collection of marginally comprehensible and consistently amusing instructions. In the kitchen, we are urged to "clean up behind yourself." We are advised that there is no smoking "in the stairwell or in the building," because once you're on the stairs it can be so hard to work out whether you're still indoors. My personal favorite, however, is this:

Office characters
None of your standard-issue Dilbert types here. We do, however, have these fine fellows:

Late Night Guy. The only reason I noticed LNG is that one morning when I was running pretty late I spotted him on the almost-empty el platform. Since then, I've noticed that while he's pretty much always out of there before i am (his cube's directly in my field of vision, so I can't help but notice these things), and i don't leave later than 5 and 6, he's never in before 9:30, and generally closer to 10. This guy's got the system down. He's always got the sports section in his hand, and he generally looks pretty dazed for the first couple of hours. I suspect some mornings he actually just comes in and takes a nap in his nice cozy private cubicle. Either way, at this point the only question is which place he's at until 4 in the morning: Nick's Beer Garden or Bar Louie? You've gotta respect the LNG.

The Saturday Night Fever Hippie. This one let me in on my second day, and the image was so irretrievably burned into my not-yet-fully-awake brain that it's all I can do not to flinch when I pass him in the hallways. He's skinny with straight blond hair, cut all one length and well below his shoulders, which at first might make one categorize him more as 'hippy' than 'disco', but don't be misled. Beneath the long luxurious Grateful-Dead hair and scruffy goatee and wire-rimmed spectacles lies a heart that beats to pure 120 BPM Gloria Gaynor, as evidenced by the shirt unbuttoned a good two buttons too far, framing a collection of gold medallions that even Snoop Dogg might covet. No shit.

Cell Phone Guy. This is another one who's been nice enough to let me in the door a few times. He's the reason I don't worry so much about showing up late or grabbing lunch at odd hours anymore, because he's pretty much always out there in the hallway, well within view of the windows to the lobby but out of earshot of the warren of cubes, talking on his cell phone. Seriously, he's out there almost every time I walk by. Who's he talking to, and about what? He wears 80s tasseled loafers and pleated khakis and pink polo shirts, and has a suspiciously orangey tan. I don't know what to make of him, but I'm considering reporting him to the Department of Homeland Security.

In marginally related news, it has just (read:yesterday) come to my attention that despite my best efforts, the photo gallery on this site looks like utter shite on any Windows machine. This is because for some ungodly reason the proper stylesheet is not read when the site is accessed by IE/Win. I have not yet been able to work out why, and I don't know that I'll have the time to try particularly hard in the immediate future, but I'm always open to suggestion from you code wizards out there.

And now, it's off to the hardware store to buy hanging hardware and roller covers. Someday this place will be finished. Someday, I promise.