Office Space

So long Office 1C13.

I have been working in the same physical building since February, 2000 and in the same office since October, 2005. Both of these are personal records for me, though the latter came to an end on Monday, when I moved offices about 15 yards across the same floor.from 1C13 to 1A32 in glorious Building 510. 

It turns out that several of us on Project Pittsburgh are violating the (until now unenforced) rule that states that only Managers and Band 9s and above are permitted to reside in Windowed Offices. I am a Band 8 (for life). Some additional teams are moving into our building in January and now, as my manager Michael remarked: “Your cover is blown.” As a result, me and half-dozen other peeps got unceremoniously evicted to interior Windowless Offices. Oh well, I think I’ll survive. After six years and a couple of months in the same office, I guess it is time for a change – and a move to another non-descript office with modular furniture in the same non-descript professional office building.

I am looking forward to the new whiteboard in my new office. It seems the warranty expired on the whiteboard in my old office several years ago - it just gave up the ghost. I have tried cleaning it with several types of solutions, but none seem to work well. One helpful colleague, so disgusted at the sight of my pathetic whiteboard, even offered some sort of Official Whiteboard Cleaner – but to no avail. That just left a terrible odor but didn’t appreciably improve the ability to write upon and erase cleanly the board. There seems to be some invisible thin film of crud (technical term) that prevents markers from functioning correctly and erasers from erasing correctly. This leads co-workers, who wish to write on my whiteboard during design work sessions, deriding my whiteboard, the quality of my markers, or both.

(Sigh. In case you are interested, I just spent 15 minutes reviewing scintillating research that some poor soul has conducted to determine the best whiteboard cleaning product. This says something about him – and probably more about me.)

The old Windowed Office of course had some advantages. Cell phone reception, an unparalleled view of the beautiful B510 parking lot, and the ability to monitor the daily thunderstorms we seem to get in the summer so as to better time my departure from.  But it wasn’t a perfect location.

On one side of my old office was Stan, who is a project manager for an unrelated project. I have known Stan since the mid-90s as we were in the same product organization (NetView). Stan is a good guy, but he pretty much spends the entire day on conference calls (with some fairly high level folks) and the walls between our offices are very thin, so I am able to pick up most of those calls. I find the new office much quieter – which sometimes is a really nice thing when developing software.

A couple of offices down from Stan there are some Marketing and Sales guys – they stick out like a sore thumb around all the Software Engineers that surround them. They tend to take conference calls and other phone calls with their speakerphones at Volume 11 (obligatory Spinal Tap reference) and their doors open. So everybody else on the aisle pretty much knows how Sales are going. I won’t miss that.

One of the Sales guys is very cheerful as well. The cadence of Marketing and Sales folks is so different from Engineers – the old dichotomy between Hard Sciences and Soft Sciences maybe?. On the other side of me was a woman from Brazil who is never in her office – I think I saw her in that office 2 times all of last year.  I wonder if she will keep her Window Office since they are such precious commodities? Sunday, I took a couple of hours and moved all my stuff, except for my phone which had to be “officially” moved by the Phone Guy on Move Day.

Looking on the bright side, each office move provides the opportunity to reduce the clutter that has accumulated since the last move and I took (some) advantage of that. In the old days before all programming materials and references were in digitized machine-readable format, I can remember boxing up 8-10 boxes of nothing but that stuff. Now I was able to move my entire office in 3 boxes – and most of those were file folders or old notebooks that I keep around for nostalgia purposes only. Items like paper copies of every single Performance Evaluation I received – I guess I do have a bit of a Pack Rat in me.

I did come across a couple of Oldies-But-Goodies. The historical artifact to the left is an authentic Acceptance Letter for Your Faithful Servant from Big Blue.  A couple of things make me chuckle when I re-read that.

I think the employment offer was extended via phone at 1:00 PM June 12 and I had accepted by 1:30 PM. Not saying that I was desperate or anything, but I really needed that job at that point in my life. I am thinking that if I was just a little savvier when it came to my career, I could have negotiated a better salary. Say something in the range of $485 a week instead of $475!

(I talked about this in Fortunate Son, but when Cody N™ saw this letter, he was so damn proud. A really fond memory.)

I also loved the fine print around the “you are shit out of luck from getting reimbursed for moving expenses if you are relocated to another Washington Metropolitan Area location”.

In other words: “We will pay to get your butt moved from Altoona to Gburg, but if we happen to need to move you to, say, Manassas in a month or two, you are on your own.  Don’t sweat it – commuting from Montgomery County to Prince William County is a breeze.”  BTW that summer of 1984 was notorious for Tractor Trailer accidents on the Cabin John Bridge – seemed like there was one every single Friday afternoon – like clockwork. Didn’t affect me – I lived half-mile from the main site, but several co-workers did the commute from Herndon everyday – every Monday morning, I would get the instant replay from them.

Then of course we have the little clause about the “physical examination with an IBM doctor”.  Interestingly enough, IBM neglected to inform their prospective employees that they also would draw blood at this examination and test for, egads, illegal drugs. I guess IBM was at the forefront of that trend (or the ass-backwards end, depending on your view).  Not that it mattered to me – hell I don’t think I had even had a beer since the week before finals in early April, 1984.

One of the guys showing me the ropes the first couple of days, Vic, pulled me aside and cautioned me, very  seriously, about this impending drug test. Vic was a nice guy but was sort of a prototypical IBMer – conservative and playing it close-to-the-vest. I guess he thought he was doing a good deed and looking out for a potential head like me.

Thinking that everyone, like all my college buds, had memorized the classic lines from Caddyshack, I made the mistake of trying to lighten the mood a bit with Vic. I deadpanned and asked him if he thought the IBM drug test would be able to detect a “hybrid of Northern California Sensimilla and Kentucky Bluegrass – you know, the kind you can play 36 holes on in the morning and get stoned on in the afternoon”.  Apparently Vic hadn’t seen that flick. Dude just stared at me, completely oblivious to the brilliance of Carl Spackler. His freaking loss. Welcome to Corporate America. Oh, BTW, I did pass the drug test.

The final historical artifact below is simply included to provide further proof to my kids that I did (at some point in my youth), actually have a somewhat healthy head of hair covering my forehead. (That is not a forehead – that is a Five Head!) Enjoy it while you still have it guys!