Office Move

In a bid to save more money to make the stock price looks better (hate stock market ), the two Markham offices has merged together last week.

There has been talks about the move for a long time, that it was going to happen but it kept getting delayed.

Finally happened. Our cubicles are now much smaller but I’m not complaining about that cos most of the manager don’t even have an office anymore.

I miss my window tho. Altho the good thing abt it is that the sun won’t shine right into my eyes in the afternoon anymore (more on this later).

Since they needed to move our old cubicles to the new place, everyone got moved into the vacant offices during the transition, which lasted for about a month. It was nice to have our own rooms but I hated the temperature in my room. It’s freezing cold in the morning and if it’s a sunny day, then boiling hot in the afternoon (西斜呀...). So hot that sometimes I need to change into my cycling shorts. And the sun shine right into my eyes starting at around 3pm and it starts earlier and earlier as fall and winter approach.

But as I said, our new cubicles are much smaller than our old ones so the fact that they put us all in spacious office rooms in the transition period is like giving us heaven and then slamming us back to hell.

The new place is all open concept like a cubicle farm. Some of my colleagues refer to them as the chicken coop. It’s actually not that bad, except the fact the all the managers are seated at the back of each row and hence can see everyone’s computer with one quick peek and that makes my life a lot harder. I rely on office hours to do quite a bit of my church work and taking this away I’m afraid that my sleep time will further diminish.

And storage space is highly limited but luckily, I hardly store any hard copies. I store most of my stuff digitally cos I lose paper all the time. But for some other ppl, they had to throw a lot of their ‘precious’  away.

Lots of bad things about the new office. For instance, there’s no more social events cos there’s no space to hold everybody. Printing is also a pain in the butt cos we have to submit or request (for large plots) online now and to have someone print them and bring them back to our desk. We used to be able to just send the document to print and go get them ourselves. We are still able to print regular size stuff but only B&W printer on my floor. Color printer is on the other floor; Going to washroom has to leave the ‘secured’ area so that we have to carry our passes with us just to go to washroom; Hot water is dispensed at one certain volume only so if you cup/mug is not a multiple of the volume, then you can’t get your cup/mug filled without overflowing; no more flavoured tea and hot chocolate available; no more underground parking – have to walk through the cold in the winter to get into the building; can hear all the phone calls that different managers were on all the time – very loud and distracting sometimes; sitting right in front of my supervisor so he’ll know if I arrive work late or leave  early; longer commute by transit etc etc.

But I also start to appreciate some of the stuff that the new office building has to offer: the close proximity with my supervisor (right behind me) means that if I need to talk to him, I know exactly when he’s at his desk and all I need to do is just to turn my head around; the shower facility is part of a gym operated by the building management(certain ppl get access to the shower and I’m one of them) is much nicer then the old place. Even provides towel service and as far as I can tell, there’s really nothing that stops me from using the gym itself since I have access to the shower and the shower connects to the gym. I guess the only thing that will stop me is my business and my laziness; Two microwaves on my floor – no need to go to the other floor like I used to and there’s hardly ever a lineup; lots of choices for food if I need to eat out; slightly closer to daycare and hence less stress on getting there on time.

Well… there’s nothing I can do. Upper management decided to move office, me small potato can only go with the flow and try to make the best of things.