Things I actually like about working in an office

This list will be short, and strangely there’s some overlap with yesterday’s list. Some of the things that frequently bug me about office life are still advantages over working from home. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far this week…
Nice Clothes: I’m sure the novelty would wear off in a week or two, but after 3 months of working in whatever I clothes I pull out of the closet in the morning (ok, 1 month of staying in my pajamas, then after the realisation that I felt like a total bum, 2 months of wearing whatever clothes I pull out of the closet) it feels kinda nice to put on a good pair of pants and a shirt with a collar. I just feel more professional and effective.
Stand-up Meetings: While it may be annoying to over-hear these meetings, its often fun when you realise you’ve fallen into one. You get up from a frustrating problem to get some caffeine and bump into someone else who’s been pondering the same issue. Before you know it, you’ve deep in an impromptu brainstorming session in the hallway, and you’re having a grand time debating potential solutions. You don’t get that working from home.
Regular Meetings: 95% of meetings are a waste of time, with too many heads and too many egos present to actually get anything done. But there’s that other 5% where you actually solve something or come up with a good plan of action, and it feels great. You can have these kinds of meetings over the phone, but you miss out on a fair bit of the comradery — on seeing the smiles on your co-workers faces.
Social Interaction: Its definitely great to be able to see my family during the day. I usually start work at 7am, catch up on my e-mail and other administrivia, then head up stairs for a quick coffee run at 8, and get to say good-morning to my wife and kids. Lunch time is just as nice, because I actually get to sit down with them and see them. But sometimes its nice to have mostly adult conversation — even if it is often lame and awkward. I’ve been unusually friendly this week, just because its nice to talk to people that don’t smell like puke or dirty diapers. I’m sure that’ll wear off soon.
Free Food: Usually once a week some department has some meeting or customer visit that provides an excuse to order in catering. I’ve become an expert at surreptitiously snagging some food as I stroll by. And during the summer there’s usually some kind of staff BBQ a couple times a month. Free food is the best kind.
Tomorrow’s my last day at the office, likely for the rest of the year. Over all, I still think I prefer my home office set-up — I have a better desk, a better chair, a better network, and a much better place to sit during conference calls. But its been good to be back in the cube farm for awhile. Plus the TV show starts back up again soon, so I’ll get my fix of office life from a much more entertaining source.

Things I hate about working in an office…

Its odd how easily I slipped back into the office routine. After 3 months of working from home, there were a couple hours where people dropped by to say hello, and then it was like I never left. Of course, I know the difference, so here are a few things that I don’t miss, now that I work from home…
Commuting: bumper to bumper traffic on the highway along-side hundreds of other bleary-eyed office workers.
Office banter, first-hand: making lame small talk about the weather/sports with people you don’t even work with, but share a cube-farm with, so feel obligated to talk to.
Office banter, second-hand: listening to the awkward small-talk made by people who don’t really know each other, but feel obligated to talk to.
The loud guy: I’ve never been in an office that didn’t have at least one. They’re the people who, for some reason, believe you need to shout into a telephone, that swearing loudly so the whole office can hear you is OK, that laughing uproariously at anything and everything is normal, that we all want to hear them snort/clear their throat/hork/burp…
The retro guy: Tight jeans, 80s hair, half-opened shirt with chest-hair billowing out, giant tinted glasses, cigarette stained teeth/breath because he still thinks smoking is cool, jokes/catch-phrases that are ten years old, may or may not drive a Camero.
The fashion victim guy: Gold chain, bluetooth headset, designer jeans, expensive shoes, name-dropping, awkwardly obvious cultural references, trying desperately to look 10 years younger than he really is, probably has a RAZR. Knows something about everything, but is knowledgeable about nothing.
(Ok, those last two don’t actually exist as a single individual, but are an amalgam of stereotypes I’ve collected having worked in various offices over the past 10 years)
The stand-up meetings: when a members of a team meet on their way to the coffee-machine and somehow fall into a heated debate about the design or implementation of their latest project… and they happen to be standing right outside your cube.
Superfluous meetings: maybe we should get Bob’s opinion on this… and Joe, Frank, Harry, and Bill should probably be here too… I’m going to conference in Edmonton…
The interruptions: that no matter how busy you look, or if you’re clearly rocking out to music on your head phones while writing your most righteous code ever, people still believe they have an open invitation to stroll in and start-up a conversation — naturally assuming you can/want to hear them.
Fire drills: AKA the “business continuity plan”
Lunch hours: the only thing more depressing about working in a cubicle, is eating a sad little sandwhich, while sitting alone in a cubicle…
Cubicles: enough said.
Stay tuned tomorrow for things I actually like about working in an office :-p

Big Summer Weekend Number Last

The saga continues, as we take the little car in one more time for some repairs. This is the last significant money we plan to spend on my Saturn SC2. Next time she drops, we’ll be putting her down. Its been a good car, taken us well over 200,000 hard kilometers over the past 7+ years, and until now has barely cost us a cent beyond normal maintenance. And I love driving it…
The other Saturn, our SUV, who’s already taken a beating to the tune of about 100,000 km since we bought it just shy of 3 years ago, is about to do probably its last haul with the whole family to New York. After some running around tomorrow, including a wedding shower for our family car mechanic (who’s already saved us thousands) we’ll be packing the whole crew up, and heading for the Interstate again. My good friend Jon is back from his submarine and is getting hitched. I haven’t yet written my best-man speech, but I’ll get on that during the 8 hour road trip.
It’ll be good to see our New York friends, but its a little bit tougher leaving home now that we… actually have a home. Life is finally getting good here, and it seems disruptive to leave it just as we’re settling in. But its only a week, and hopefully it’ll be worth it…

Working on his Ws and Ls

Yesterday, after work, I was sitting out on the back deck, enjoying my recently installed AirTunes setup (streaming music, wirelessly, from the computer upstairs to the speakers I mounted on the wall of our house, controlled, wirelessly, by my iPhone) when Benjamin slid open the patio door, and toddled out with one of my shoes in his hands — a shoe nearly half his height.
He proceeds to pull my slipper off my right foot, and hang my left shoe off my big toe, and then walks away (closing the patio door behind him for once.) A few minutes later, he comes back out with the other shoe, and once again pulls off my slipper and carefully tries his very best to put the shoe on my left foot.
When he’s done, he gets up from his squat, inspects his work with pride, smiles up at me and says:
WWwwwallllllk?
Of course, I couldn’t possibly say no to all that effort, so we went for a walk.

Drowning in Nostalgia

One of the side-effects of unpacking (and of packing) is that you’ll inevitably come across all sorts of crap you didn’t even remember you had. I’m infamous for purging possessions whenever we move, but there are some things I just can’t force myself to get rid of. I have boxes of notes, keep-sakes, tapes, mini-discs, floppy discs, and trinkets from high school. Nicole’s not so much on the notes, but she has tons of photographs, and she can tell you when and where each of them was taken.
One of the side-effects of old photographs is that they make you feel old! Something about how a picture that’s barely 5 years old has already started to fade and discolor a bit, making it look like something you dug up in your grandma’s attic — even though its a picture of you, and you remember it being taken, and it wasn’t that long ago!!
The thing is, Nicole and I have been together a long time. This year’s anniversary, like most of the previous ones, kinda flew by without much pause for recollection. As is the norm for us, we were too deep in the middle of some massive life change to really stop and celebrate how far we’ve come. But as I was digging through boxes at lunch time today, looking for something or other I’d lost, I stumbled across piles of photo albums, with pictures taken what seems like a life time ago. And I had to stop and marvel at this journey.
While we’ve been married 7 years, Nicole and I have been together over 10. We met in high school, married before we were done college, and haven’t really slowed down since. Click on for a few discolored, somewhat faded pictures, that make us look like the couple of old married people we really are…
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