Describe your workplace

[rhinosaur]

I'm oddly curious about this. What is where you work like?

So I'm in grad school, and have several different roles. Lately I've been doing more of the materials science thing, so I've been spending time in a very messy lab. There is stuff everywhere. Large heavy metal vacuum chambers and big blue furnaces are stationed in several places around the room, and there are all sorts of wires and tubes coming out of them. Each is labeled with a printed out image: one of a cowboy, one of a question mark, another with a crown. All of the trash cans are filled to capacity, and there is always a lot of glassware in the sink. If you want space in a fume hood, you've got to move someone else's stuff. Various fancy digital things are scattered around the rooms; some handheld, some too big to move except by taking them apart. The age of any of this equipment spans at least three decades. The price spans six digits.

Occasionally the mess will be punctuated with worn-out hazard signs. There are several items claiming "clean room only," despite the fact that there is no longer a clean room. Some radiation warning signs are on the wrong doors, probably because the X-ray machines were moved.

The juxtaposition of high-tech science with this chaotic environment is curious, but in my experience is a much more common scenario than a perfect lab with perfect equipment and no safety violations.

[Jeffster]

I'm no good at describing things, but here's some pictures:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3127/2574327648_75541310db_m.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3146/2574331480_a2006ded33_m.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3160/2573515707_1b56b64395_m.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3153/2573519119_5d25df9aa1_m.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3034/2574345576_356759d40a_m.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3131/2573526459_a716e63af5_m.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3059/2574352754_3fb143d2d6_m.jpg


Bonus points if you can figure out which desk is mine. ;)

[scantilyclad]

i would say the first desk is yours.

I work at wal-mart. It looks like..wal-mart.

[ceecee]

I co-manage a comedy club. It's like controlled chaos at times. The nights we don't have shows, it's like a normal bar. Guitar Hero, Open Mic, sports stuff. I rarely work at night though. I have a office behind the bar. Which is very nice because it is soundproofed and I can work and not be disturbed.

My days consist of coordinating everything from deliveries to staffing to seeing to liquor and maintaining the dispensing systems. Doing payroll, accommodation's and flights for comics, overseeing the maintenance staff. It's a lot of work but I do get to set my own hours and I can do payroll day from home and I love that. I get paid well for what I do but staying on top of things can be a bitch if I take a day or two off (I want to chuck my cell phone in a lake sometimes). I have the evenings to go to my classes and spend time with my kids and Sundays off. The other manager and I get along very well and our schedules are perfect for each ones lifestyle.

[spirilis]

It's built out of an old Proctor & Gamble manufacturing plant, redone/painted/furnished into office buildings. I work on the 2nd floor; the walls are yellow, the ceiling is white with pipes and HVAC equipment and lights hanging off the ceiling, but all the I-beams and supports are painted white.

Dull grey modular cubicles, more of an "open" environment (we're not enclosed in a cube with a small door) with long tables beside our cubicles providing an L-shaped joint. Windows that don't open, and the building looks out over the Baltimore harbor.

Outside it smells like... something weird, never quite sure how to describe it. Slightly sweet like molasses, sometimes smells like burnt transmission fluid. There's a plant next to the campus on one side, and a plant on the other. The neighborhoods around the campus are rowhouses with really shitty roads, quaint dive bars and everything stuffed into this inner-city structure so that it all blends together (funeral home, next to a bakery, next to a bank... next to a school that I never knew existed until I started jogging around those streets, it's too easy to miss). There are several parking lots all awkwardly placed around the ends of the neighborhoods, with a mix between gravel, fresh asphalt, and old worn-out asphalt, rows of parking spots awkwardly placed so they sometimes produce tight spots.

I work on the 2nd floor, which is as I described. The stairwell looks very industrial, painted dirty metal everywhere with cinderblock walls and dirty concrete floors. There are 3 elevator cars which are slow and clunky, definitely old. The 1st floor has a stunning glass lobby with a conference room off to the side with glass walls donning some kind of blur-out stripe around one's general eyesight, assumably to foster some level of privacy in the room. The first floor offices have "cubicles" but they're not really enclosed--more like fancy-schmancy white desks with white fabric walls, some rubbermaid-like stack of drawers next to each one, probably the most "open" looking work environment I've ever seen.

Conference rooms litter the first and 2nd floors, and we have a few Polycom video conferencing systems in there too. We also annexed a floor in an adjacent building, which was furnished by a different company and leased out to us. Not sure how to describe it, it just looks different. The large conference room in that building has a motorized black "curtain" that does a fantastic job eliminating all light while shut.

Lots of extroverts, or extrovert-acting introverts all over the place. Surviving there has always required the ability to pull upon a lot of energy, or at least it used to be like that. Things have slowed down ever since we've grown and many teams are no longer understaffed and such. In all honesty, it's starting to feel too "grown-up" and mature for me; I do long for the crazy fast-paced work environment of earlier years, although I wonder if it's too late for me to make such a transition. It would be a major shock for me to go from the less-fast-paced environment my workplace has become to a start-up company, for example.

[Jeffster]

i would say the first desk is yours.


Ooh you're good. But can you figure out the types for the people who have the other 4 desks? :tongue:

[Eileen]

My workplace is a classroom with 24 desks. There's a wide aisle in the middle of the room, and I have 12 desk facing 12 desks. One one end of the aisle is the chalk board, and on the other end is the interactive whiteboard. In the middle is my cart with laptop/projector/miscelleneous crap. In the back corner of the room is my desk, a small teacher desk buried under papers. There's a long table beside it, also buried under papers. My computer table is also papered up. At the beginning of the year, I manage to be somewhat organized, but by now, I have just given up.

[bluebell]

I work in a cube farm, but a reasonably pleasant one at the moment. My desk is covered with papers and a bunch of intrays when I periodically try to get more organised. I have technical documents stuck up around my cubicle, some postcards of bug-eyed fish, a plastic dinosaur (gift from an ex-colleague) and a couple of my drawings, framed. I need a lot of visual clutter.

The windows are floor to ceiling glass and there are really nice views out the windows, apart from the main road next to us.

The actual office is a rabbit warren and after being here nearly a year, I still have to think how to get to a couple of the meeting rooms. There is a small kitchen (cleanliness varies from day to day). There about 30 cubicles at our end of the office. Um. I don't know how to describe it other than typical cubicles. The manager's offices are off a dark corridor, next to the photocopier and fax machine. The store room is small and hot because of the printer and photocopier, and the store cupboard is usually missing anything useful.

[Geoff]

It's a house. The sun is shining outside, so I'm sometimes sat on the grass.. other times I'm indoors on the sofa with the laptop and my papers, and a cat asleep by my feet. There's an aquarium in the corner... african cichlids.

Yep, I'm working at home today.

[Ivy]

Usually I work at home, on the couch with my TV dinner table housing my laptop, usually with music blaring for background noise. Other times I go to the Open Eye Cafe in Chapel Hill:

http://www.northcarolinatravels.com/carrboro/carrboro-open-eye-cafe.jpg

However, since the kids are out of school for the summer and Thing 2's babysitter (who lives in the next town over and has a child in school in our town) is no longer doing pickup and dropoff service, I've been taking the kids to her house and staying to work in her sunroom so I don't have to drive back and forth twice. It's a very pleasant space to be in so I plan to do this as often as possible.

I sit on a green chaise lounge with my laptop and papers. Across the room is a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of the woods and pond out back. The floor is bamboo, very light and bright. There are potted plants everywhere, candles (which I don't burn), and a windchime in the corner. I think she meditates in there or something. Anyway it's a very nice space to work in and if I remember I'll take pics next week.

[nottaprettygal]

It's built out of an old Proctor & Gamble manufacturing plant . . .

Is it creepy that I know exactly where you work, and that I can be there in less than 15 minutes? It should be.

:thelook:

[proteanmix]

Yeah as soon as he said Domino Sugar I was like "Stalker Time!!"

[Jen]

I work from home in our dining room http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd203/Jen1357/P1010059.jpg


Or I am at a wedding venue such as this one.

http://www.relaischateaux.com/RelaisChateaux/img/adherent/fearrington/fearrington-1-gd.jpg

and this one.

http://www.dupontcastle.com/castles/mcculloc.jpg

Or at a hotel or Inn like this one.

http://www.fearrington.com/house/lib/images/theinn/room%20gallery/image4.jpg

These are some of my clients.

http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd203/Jen1357/24224_1182542447.jpg

[spirilis]

Is it creepy that I know exactly where you work, and that I can be there in less than 15 minutes? It should be.

:thelook:

No, INTJs don't frighten me ;)

I can make any assassination attempt look like an awkward walk in the park with my powers of shadow-Fe.

[Jen]

Is it creepy that I know exactly where you work, and that I can be there in less than 15 minutes? It should be.

I would imagine that would make his day. :devil:

[spirilis]

Then again, it's not the vocal members of this board I should be worried about, it's the nonvocal members who may lurk... :thelook: (edited post)

[Eileen]

Usually I work at home, on the couch with my TV dinner table housing my laptop, usually with music blaring for background noise. Other times I go to the Open Eye Cafe in Chapel Hill:

http://www.northcarolinatravels.com/carrboro/carrboro-open-eye-cafe.jpg



I love Open Eye, but I find it really difficult to work there. It's so distracting! But then, I don't benefit much from background noise.

[Geoff]

I love Open Eye, but I find it really difficult to work there. It's so distracting! But then, I don't benefit much from background noise.

I find background noise very distracting.. but oddly I can live with background tv when I'm working at home. As long as it isn't something too exciting (not usually a problem with television).

[Ivy]

I love Open Eye, but I find it really difficult to work there. It's so distracting! But then, I don't benefit much from background noise.

The ambient noise can be kind of distracting. I usually wear headphones. When I go there with my study buddy in the evenings, we try to get a table in the quiet conference room. It's just so hard for me to focus at home, I find I need to be somewhere to really get much done.

[Eileen]

The ambient noise can be kind of distracting. I usually wear headphones. When I go there with my study buddy in the evenings, we try to get a table in the quiet conference room. It's just so hard for me to focus at home, I find I need to be somewhere to really get much done.


Yeah, I can't get jack done at home. Really, for my work, it's best to go somewhere without internets for awhile.

[colmena]

I do yoga whilst watching the moon and the sea.

[Ivy]

Yeah, I can't get jack done at home. Really, for my work, it's best to go somewhere without internets for awhile.

*cough* This may be why one reason why I get more done in the sitter's sunroom. The problem is I need internets for some parts of my work. For the little comprehension passages I write (several are near the bottom of my blog if anyone feels like reading them) I need to fact-check online. Oddly enough there's usually an admonition in the chapters about research skills not to rely on internet resources, but we all do it for the passages.

[Geoff]

*cough* This may be why one reason why I get more done in the sitter's sunroom. The problem is I need internets for some parts of my work. For the little comprehension passages I write (several are near the bottom of my blog if anyone feels like reading them) I need to fact-check online. Oddly enough there's usually an admonition in the chapters about research skills not to rely on internet resources, but we all do it for the passages.

Yep, I deliberately don't put the internet on in the room I work in, so that I am forced to walk to a new room to waste time reading email or a forum!

[Ivy]

Here's where I've been working, and hopefully will continue through the summer:

Pond and woods view is a bit blurry, but rest assured it's lovely.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v171/englshivy/061808_09251.jpg

I can look out this window and see the boy whenever I like. He's usually in the sandbox. Note minifridge where my son's sitter has been leaving bottled waters and snacks for me:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v171/englshivy/061808_09252.jpg

My "desk":
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v171/englshivy/061808_09241.jpg

[Delilah]

The place where I work is just an average cubicle farm. There's little else to see but eggshell white dividers, each one containing a stopped figure in some drab shade of grey. The sound is unremarkable: just the usual grinding of teeth, the soft sounds of tinny, flavorless music, and people sounding out impactful words to add to intra-office memos.

The main aisle dividing the right side of the office from the left is just wide enough for two people to walk uncomfortably side by side, rubbing clammy shoulders and bumping bony hips. In some sort of weird trick of perspective, it appears to descend downwards endlessly, leaving anyone traveling that path with the feeling that they are standing at the top of an endless valley of slowly writhing grey.

After an indeterminately long time spent walking, a worker will find a fork in the aisle. One often makes the mistake of traveling down the right hand path, but there is little worth noting over that way.

Along the left hand path, though, things truly start to get interesting. The tone and nature of activity change. Twenty paces down, you start to notice it: hunched, gnarled office veterans scamper, scurry, and lurch across the aisle. They all make a high-pitched hum in a jarringly discordant unintentional mockery of harmony. Trails of ink-stained papers are left in their wake. They never pick them up as they hurl themselves from cube to cube. They never look back.

As one descends further down the path, closer to the executive cubes, the hum crescendos and intensifies. There's a smell down there, too: a potpourri of cheap colognes that gently lick your nose and whip themselves into your clothes, like flames made of wet cardboard.

Towards the end of the path, the smells and sounds come to a fever pitch. Some glitch in the air conditioning has the saccharine scented air swirling around you, and the hums become a cacophony of howls.

Neckties hang from the ceiling, like a sea of black daggers threatening to lacerate the top of your head if you dare to stand up straight.

I've never been further down the path than that, but somehow, I KNOW what is beyond. The vision of it burns itself into your mind as you turn and flee to your desk: clapping, capering office workers, yelping wordless cries and swirling about a jagged throne of scintillating diamonds and rubies. Bright flashes of red light paint executive faces as they fawn sycophantically for the attention of the CEO.


As I said, the journey along that path is far more entertaining than heading to the right. That trail only ends in rainbows, unicorns, and jolly elves.

[htb]

The office is one of several of a manifold publishing company. My group's workspace is the only of its kind, incorporating desk places into a spacious enclosure -- whose size and decorations are redolent of a sitcom set. I love it.

[Peguy]

I work in a sweat shop.

[grendiecat]

right--a bunch of cubicles here too--i work in one back in a corner, some view of the outdoors but i never see it because my desk is like a foxhole--busy all day, barely look up, totally focussed, pictures of fun stuff from trips, pictures of my beautiful son on my storage cabinets above me, but i never see the pictures myself, buried in two monitors at once, on phone all day long with patients. loud colleague to the south--always have to get him off his speaker phone yacking to the world