Client forgot to mention that 'essential' feature. Again.
Déjà vu: been there, seen it... haven't done it
Déjà vu. I’ve just walked into the offices of a prospective new client back in Blighty for the first time and everything looks familiar, from the faux marble cladding and chromed door handles in the reception to the roughened white wallpaper and very specific shade of blue carpet tiles on the main floor.
It’s as if Covid and the WFH revolution simply passed them by.
For all their pretensions of originality, most office buildings in London look the same: bland new smoked glassy bits on the outside, the same old carpet tiles on the inside. The bigger the building, the stronger the similarity to all the others next to it.
Uniformity is to be expected in a city. It’s like the way everything in New York is brown and all the chocolate made in America smells like soiled underwear. Indeed, it might taste like soiled underwear too but I can’t be sure, and trust that I never shall.
Déjà vu. One of the notable aspects of a city that doesn’t feel the need to grant unlimited construction rights to trouser-pocket-shuffling bankers and limp-dicked Arab billionaires trying to compensate for their inadequacies is that London still has relatively few skyscrapers. Instead, oranges-and-lemons Lahndunnahs tend to live and work near ground level, shuffling around narrow cobbled streets in their top hats and carrying Gladstone bags, swirling through the fog, hailing Hackney carriages with their umbrellas and jumping on red buses.
Quaint it may be but it has encouraged even more uniformity in building design, with leading architects clamouring to create exactly the same thing as each other. Almost without exception, this involves fitting a glass atrium in the main area to filter in natural light (when it’s not a gor blimey pea-souper, of course) and install a running water feature near reception.
(To obtain this effect in my old Hoxton hipster office a decade ago, I just wiped the layer of nicotine tar off a window and ran the cold tap.)
Déjà vu. I have not visited this prospective client before but their offices look like a place I used to work in. This conjures a mix of emotions. I had fun times and difficult times there but my most enduring memory was the curious contradiction in that the toilets were spotless and the kitchen was disgusting.
Oh, that kitchen. Every morning, a random employee would explode something in the microwave, making it unusable for the rest of the day. Crushed plastic cups littered the worktops, there were tea stains on the ceiling, and the floor was covered with a crunchy layer of instant coffee granules.
Sounds familiar? Of course it does, every communal staff kitchen in an office is like that. On good days, you’d think Michael Flatley and the cast of Riverdance had been serving themselves drinks there. On bad days, the interior of the fridge looks like a scene from Se7en.
Déjà vu, you see?
(Incidentally, my old Hoxton hipster office had its kitchen right next to the toilets. Americans would have recognised an ambient chocolate aroma in the afternoons.)
Anyway, later that day, I nip round to an existing client’s address to drop something off. More marble and chrome, rough-textured wallpaper and blue carpet tiles. Déjà vu, heh. But ... hang on, something’s different.
Stepping out of the lift, my initial notion is I have ended up at the wrong floor. I immediately step backwards into the lift, treading on the toes of the woman behind me. As I turn and apologise, the lift doors try to slice me in two, so I quickly leap back into the lift in an unintentionally threatening manner. The woman retreats sharply into the corner of the lift, tightly clutching her handbag in front.
In a Bond film, I’d be Daniel Craig with a saucy one-liner about asking her if she’d like to see my elevator pitch, offering to massage her foot and we’d be shagging before we reached the sixth floor. In real life, I giggle and stammer and dance around a bit like Michael McIntyre – copious amounts of sweatiness included – for six long seconds of embarrassment until the lift doors, which had paused out of confusion without fully closing, re-open.
Sure enough, I am on the correct floor but I don’t recognise it. That is, it looks familiar in that déjà vu kind of way but nothing is quite the same as how it was just a week ago. They have built some new meeting rooms, taken down others and mucked about with the partitions.
I turn back to the unfortunate woman still cowering in the lift and ask, leeringly, “Do you have the decorators in?” while half-remembering that this might be a euphemism for something. She reaches slowly into her handbag with a wide-eyed determination on her face but I have already walked off onto the main floor and out of pepper spray range.
The decorators haven’t just changed a few things, they have all but rebuilt the layout of the entire floor. Storage rooms containing spare kit have vanished without trace. Where there was open-plan space to chuck a football around when working late at night, there is now a cluster of glass-walled meeting rooms.
They have even built a kind of zig-zag corridor that snakes around the newly constructed plaster walls in such a convoluted way that getting from one side of the floor to the other now requires the assistance of Google Maps and involves at least one restroom visit and two passport checks.
On the way, I come across two lost schoolchildren, a withered Japanese man who thought the war was still on, and a perky girl with ruby slippers skipping along with a dog and three freaks who look like they work in the advertising department.
I should not be surprised, since this particular company likes to rebuild its own office interiors on a disconcertingly frequent basis. They employ builders to come in overnight so that, from one day to the next, the landscape of the workplace would change, to the delight (and dismay) of staff the following morning.
Employees must find it surreal to walk into your site of employment and have to find out where everything is all over again, on a daily basis. I imagine there must be a grey-clad Stranger somewhere orchestrating the nightly changes, erecting walls and routing corridors like in Dark City, except without Riff-Raff to lead you through the Crystal Maze afterwards.
Let the tuning commence!
When I finally locate my client, he is looking glum. For years, despite his status as a company director, he has resisted pressure to have a room of his own, preferring to sit with his teams on the main floor. They tried to build an private office for him on at least two occasions but he would simply dodge the builders, shuffle his desk further across the floor and fill the empty room with boxes containing old keyboards, broken printers and his bicycle.
Eventually, it seems, they pushed him quite literally into a corner from which he could no longer escape, like some cruel game of human chess, and had an office erected around him as he sat there. The builders were still finishing the wallpaper and sealing the glass as I arrived.
He tells me the development project launch date has been pushed back again. Apparently, during user acceptability testing, the department that had commissioned the work – always referred to as “The Customer” by the company’s own IT support people – suddenly remembered something jolly important that they’d forgotten to mention at the start of the project, some 18 months ago. As I understand it, The Customer was only vaguely apologetic and insisted that the problem be fixed before go live. And it’s the fifth time they have done it.
This is quite funny because almost exactly the same thing has just happened with one of my other clients. In much the same way, this Other Customer keeps coming up with demands for new functions that they themselves didn’t realise they wanted, so the project gets put back time and time again.
Hmm, now I’m thinking about it, it has happened several times with, well, all of them, all in their marble-chrome-carpet-tile offices, all in recent weeks. It’s like déjà vu, how odd, how curious, how funny indeed.
I tell my client in his new glass-and-plaster coffin how funny I think it is, especially since I am about to go on holiday. He does not find it amusing. If anything, begins to look even more glum as he picks up his phone and mutters what I’m vainly hoping is a voice password but isn’t.
“Lock the doors.”
Déjà vu: it happens when they change something. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, eh? (Boom-tish!)
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling tech journalism, training and digital publishing. He is impressed with the unerring uniformity of every office refurbishment experience, especially how it predictably leads, without fail, to 27 employees on a bench of rickety desks half a kilometre from the nearest wifi repeater and forced to share two power sockets and a single Ethernet port.
Oh, but surely you’ve got a signed (agreed) scope… well, we normally do. The fun part is when two different departments (ours/ours, or ours/theirs) don’t talk to each other. I may, or may not, have mentioned we’re setting up some data centres and deploying Zero Trust for all our support access, except the migration team from the old data centres want the customer personnel - counting above 150 credentials - to be as-is, not via Zero Trust because, well, they told them they’d do it this way before Zero Trust became a requirement.
The killer part is the migration team see it as a service issue (business as usual) because it’s to do with logins, yet it’s in their legally binding design which ignores Zero Trust when migrating users, so we can’t enforce Zero Trust.
Kills me. Just like the customer thinking everything is in the Zero Trust Offline Password Vault (actually an online system, but with physical hard copy of password split across two physical safes), yet our Security Team demand this should only be the required credentials needed to get a minimum viable environment working so Active Directory is available for everything else… One of them keeps failing to talk to the other, so they occasionally bump into issues, like a lack of secure printing area where our Operation Centre is co-located with the customer staff.
Non déjà-vu. Is it Jamais-vu?
Recently taken possession of new, refurbished offices. First sign of rain: Ceiling tiles came down. Now that is déjà-vu as I worked in the same offices about a decade ago and they did that back then too.