Temporary Office

Yesterday, Friday, was our last day in the office on Baker Street. As of Monday, we'll be in another managed office, down near Victoria station. We've got a huge new office near Shepherd's bush, in a brand new building, but it's still being finished, so we won't be moving into it until January. It's exciting to be in a company that's growing enough to need a new office. It reminds me a bit of my InTouch days, when we moved into a bigger office in Richmond, and spent the weekend pulling cat-5 cable so we'd have networking on Monday. The company I'm with now is big enough that the network & systems team is handling all that stuff this weekend, instead of needing to just use developers that know a bit about networks.

It's a managed office as well, so a lot of the basic infrastructure is in place already. I certainly hope it's more well managed that the on we're leaving. The bathroom is frequently out of hand towels, or have freakishly hygroscopic kitchen paper towel instead. More often than not, one of the two toilets is out of order, and the urinal smells like they only clean it once a day, even though it desperately needs it more often, as can be seen from the patina of crusted yellow dried urine all over it. The bathroom stinks, partly due to the urinal, partly because the automatic air freshener has been empty for months, plaintively beeping an "fill me" notice every ten seconds.

Come January, we'll all be packing up our laptops and screens again as we move into the "new new" office, as we've been calling it. As nice as it will be to have a shorter commute, it looks like the lunch situation could be pretty dire. The office is in a small new office complex, much of which is still being built. There are no shops around, and the canteen in the building is in the half of the building that only the building owners' employees have access too. They have half the building, and the other have is being rented out to tenants such as ourselves. I can only hope that the eventually, and soon, realize that they could be making more revenue if they open up the canteen to the rest of the building. Across the motorway from us is Westfield mall, an enormous new shopping mall, which I'm sure has plenty of food shops, but it's a 20 minute walk, due to how far away the nearest crossing of the motorway is. I'm not sure yet where I'm going to get my lunches, but I'm sure I'll figure something out.