Struggling through the Crystal Maze in our hunt for a spare CAT5
There are many cubicles – this one's mine
“For heaven’s sake, they’ve moved everything.” Sharp observation. Of course they moved everything, it’s an office move. If they hadn’t moved everything, some of your kit would be hovering in the air 10 metres away, where you used to sit.
As office moves go, at one of my client’s premises, this latest one has been one of the shortest in distance: we have been moved across the room, just a little bit. Enough to give you the blues all the same.
The team had initially been relocated three flights downstairs from our old office a fortnight ago, and this week we have been shunted sideways a little. We are knights on a chessboard. We move in mysterious ways.
“My PC’s not working.” Well, evidently it is, because the large rectangular thing facing you on top of your desk is showing a Windows desktop.
“But it’s not connecting.” Ah yes, that’ll be because I unplugged your Ethernet cable from the floor so that I could plug mine in its place.
Our new home is a pod of five desks, eight computers, 11 screens and a telephone, all expected to run from two power sockets and a solitary working Ethernet port. Whoever arrives at the office first (that’ll be me) gets to use the secure high-speed wired network; for everyone else, they’re left to juggle VPN options over the shit WiFi that’s shared with the 14 billion other tech-sweatshop workers in the same building. It’s either that they have to spend another day in a corner occupying themselves with the glitter, glue and scissors.
My first-ever employer used to inflict office moves on his staff twice a year, forcing everyone to pack up, swap floors and generally reshuffle within the same building. I enjoyed them because he paid me overtime to help shift crates over the weekend but it still seemed rather pointless.
I suspect it was a means of revenge on his staff’s profligacy with the contents of the stationery cupboard, since every move produced a veritable cornucopia of lost biros and paperclips from under the desks. No really. The first and only time I ever asked if I could order some more biros for the team (I was secretary to a magazine publisher before I turned to journalism), he insisted I drop onto all fours. Ah, I’d heard about this, I thought: that’s what happens to vulnerable young men who hope make a career in London… but no. He simply wanted me to crawl under everyone’s desks. Five minutes later, I’d collected three dozen virtually unused ballpoint pens.
So if you ever saw the managing director stomping across the accounts floor clutching a sheaf of Viking Direct invoices, you knew an office move was on the cards.
Of course, in those days, it was simpler to relocate computers around an office because only a handful of them were equipped with modems. All you needed was a freelance ex-BT engineer to follow you around for an afternoon, flourishing his sonic screwdriver wherever you pointed at a skirting board.
In modern times, the morning after an office move inevitably sees forehead-rubbing employees forming into little groups as they wonder how the 100-strong sales department is going to function from the two Ethernet ports they have been allocated.
Sure, if this was a small business, you’d just rack them up yourself, but this is frowned upon in the corporate world. I discovered this at another client’s office when I got bored waiting and nipped out to PC World on the corner, bought a plastic 8-port router and had a bunch of us up and running within 15 minutes.
I was subsequently told off for taking the law into my own hands, and I was asked mockingly whether I had some kind of death wish. I took this as a compliment: they were accusing me of being the Charles Bronson of contract workers.
What makes this week’s office move different is that the floor to which the team has been moved is nominally open-plan but cluttered up with lots of glass meeting rooms. There is so much glass that it’s like wandering through a hall of mirrors. The temptation to go Bruce Lee on the lot is almost overwhelming.
This has forced lots of staff into a series of mini-moves as they arrive in the morning to discover their desk areas have been encased within yet another aquarium erected by goblins overnight. A pair of beautifully sewn leather shoes sit on the desk and an email informs them that they must now be shunted out onto what remains of the main floor and make do with the last handful of network ports out there in the wild.
Already, fights have begun to break out as people wrestle over CAT5 – I suppose you’d call them CAT fights, eheheh – while lost employees huddle forlornly around makeshift log fires near the lifts and opportunist scavengers roam the building selling RJ45s and offcuts of carpet tile.
Back in my old Hoxton Tech City office in London, I considered building a glass-walled meeting room but only because I didn’t want opaque walls to block the natural light that streamed through the tall windows from gleaming across the sexy hipster polished wooden flooring. I’m nothing if not practical.
Otherwise, what are glass meeting rooms for? They offer no privacy for meetings at all. Everyone can see you and who you’re with, and in most cases they can hear what you’re saying and observe what’s displayed on the plasma presentation screen.
Walking along the corridor at this workplace is uncannily like wandering through a shopping mall. I frequently stop to take a closer look at the goods on display. If I stand there long enough, the people inside begin to notice me, stop talking to each other, fall silent and stare back. Sometimes, other people in the corridor stop to see what I am looking at, until there is a small crowd on both sides of the glass.
I am reminded of the Shaun of the Dead posters.
As any of the Th13teen Ghosts [NSFW] can attest, it’s just as odd when you’re inside one of these glass boxes. I spent an hour in one for a meeting the other day and I discovered it produces an effect that makes you think you’re in an Jurassic Park observation deck looking out as the velociraptors prance by. It is most distracting.
I was supposed to be watching a demonstration on the plasma screen but couldn’t help notice a man walking past down the corridor carrying a large basket of fruit. Then another one. Then three all at once, each burdened by apples, bananas and grapes in cartoonish wicker baskets. Had they come to work directly from their allotments? It was like watching a procession of the bastard children of Red Riding Hood and the Easter Bunny.
But no, this is Euro hipsterland where fruit delivery by basket is standard practice, funded by salary stagnation and another round of IT layoffs.
Shortly afterwards, two young woman stroll by in deep conversation. One of them looks at me for an instant as they pass. Two minutes later, they walk slowly back, and this time she is staring at me. No sooner have they passed by than they make one more return journey. She is still staring at me but is laughing. She says something to her friend, who turns to look at me. Now they are both laughing.
Just as I am about to get annoyed by this atrocious primitive behaviour on the dinosaur trail, a man grabs my attention by walking past in the opposite direction, pushing a wheelbarrow piled high with brown paper packets of ‘artisan crisps’. “You damn raptors!” I cry out, jumping up – much to the surprise of everyone else in the observation deck, I mean meeting room.
It’s a good job they can’t open doors.
After the meeting, I return to my desk and waste ten minutes trying to persuade my PC to log in to the network, only to discover that some sneaky bugger opposite has hijacked my Ethernet cable. Well, he’s not in at the moment, so I jam his cable back into the back of my own PC. For good measure, I open lots of windows on his screen, grab a screenshot and make it his desktop background image. This is BoFH circa 1998: the old ways are the best.
Just as I am doing this, a group of laughing young staffers walks up to my desk. The two young women are among them and they are not laughing any more. One is asking what I am doing at her desk. The other reaches for her pepper spray. Someone else picks up a phone to call security – but that’s OK because I unplugged it earlier so I could plug mine in its place.
I make my excuses and slip away before anyone can discover what I was doing. With the help of some passersby, a conveniently bored getaway driver and Google Maps, I eventually find my way through the Crystal Maze to my own desk in its identical looking pod.
I have received an email:
Sorry folks. Office move again tomorrow!
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. Since he is not actually employed at any of his clients’ addresses, he wouldn’t mind if they moved him from one desk to the next on a daily basis – just as long as they pay the daily rate. He wishes he could keep hold of the nice office chair, though. The one without the brown stain.
For my last move I went from a full office with bookshelves for my entire engineering library to a tiny cube jammed in with 3 neighbours and everyone gets precisely 1 drawer. I kept the dual monitors though. Well yeah, they had a swiveling base so they could be turned to portrait. Two portrait mode monitors side-by-side, why that’s practically as good as a 30”. I existed like that for several years when the company started contemplating “hot desking,” but thankfully they sold out to a competitor instead. Everybody laid off. Whew!
Not been subjected to one of those for a few years now (wfh and having to book a desk at my current job) bit going back a few 20+ years my then employer made an art form of desk moves.
They were very desk size = rank when I first started there. I remember a desk move where one person was promoted and hence got a slightly (8”) bigger desk. To accommodate this they moved about 32 desks in the row about 1/4” so that finally they had enough room to get the bigger desk in. The numbers could be off but you get the idea.....
They also used to complain when we wanted number of desks x 2 plus spare network ports under a group of desks as it was putting stuff in that wasn’t needed.
Some years later we got more useful people who understood that leaving spares in was a very good idea - especially if someone decided they needed another printer or two.....
Now I have a laptop and a fairly large bag so I can sit anywhere and work - often do.....