Category: Office

I feel bad saying this after my work just spent so much time and money on getting renovations to convince us all to come back into the office, but I am absolutely never going back into the office again. See, things changed last year due to some very unfortunate circumstances, but they changed for the better. Not many people necessarily agree with me, but for the small few of us who have loved these changes, life has improved tremendously. 

That’s the issue though, you see. Now that I’ve experienced just how good it is to work from home, I never want to go back into the office. I don’t care that my bosses just renovated the place and that they got professional office tinting. Close to Melbourne, office spaces and bosses always try to outdo one another. It’s like they think if they have the best office space they can pretend they don’t have a (word redacted) culture. They think employees will be dazzled by fancy views, big kitchens and hot desking. In a lot of cases, they’re right and they even managed to fool me for a while. But I won’t be fooled anymore. Now that I know what it’s like to work in my tracksuit pants and wake up ten minutes before my first meeting, I can never be won over by afternoon beers or anything ever again.

I had to go into the office last week for an in-person meeting with my bosses, and I’ll admit that the new commercial glass tinting did look good. It’s definitely the type of thing that would have impressed me twelve months ago. But new year, new me and fancy new commercial office tinting isn’t what gets me out of bed anymore. 

Anyway, I’ve been writing this blog post whilst my coffee boils. I’ve got a meeting in ten minutes and half of the people will be tuning in from the office and half are at home. The people in the office are absolute suckers.

Space. The final frontier. Well, it’s not really the final frontier, is it? After all, we’ve barely explored the ocean of our own planet. Personally, I think we’re more likely to have cowboy duels in space than we are underwater, so I’d call the ocean the final frontier. But that’s not really the point.

Space. The second-to-last frontier. It’s mysterious, big and really, really dark. Unless you’re near the sun, then I suppose it wouldn’t be that dark. I’m getting side-tracked, though. Let me get to the actual point here.

I know it’s been a roundabout way of getting here, but I just wanted to talk about how my boss has assigned me the impossible task of the office fitout. Melbourne has plenty of offices and plenty of space, but I doubt it has many space offices. This is a big task I’ve been given, and to make matters worse I’m expected to do it while at home. All I want at the end of a long workday is to come home and feed my thirty-seven cats, then go to bed. I don’t want to stay up designing an office while Mr Cuddle-Bunny complains about my laptop’s light. Not ideal.

Hey, I have an idea. Maybe I can find a Melbourne office design business that will make the space office for me! After all, Mr Sharp didn’t say I couldn’t get help. He did forbid the rest of the staff from helping me, but he said nothing about outsourcing some assistance.

I can’t believe he’s given me this task just because I put too much toner in the printer, causing it to malfunction, explode and almost destroy the entire building. It was an honest mistake.

Well, the joke’s on him because I’m going to make the best space-themed office, and I’m not going to put any effort into it. I just hope it won’t be too expensive.

Sandra isn’t happy, and for once, I have nothing to do with it. That’s a nice feeling, even though I can really see where’s she coming from, what with this new boss not being…exactly what we expected, I’ll say. The bosses from on high got on touch and said they had a replacement for the other guy after he threw himself out the window (or was pushed. I have my suspicions).

Anyway, I’m looking at lighting for the office. With everything going on, you’d expect we’d be hard at work getting new clients. Things have been tight ever since Lawrence Corp kept eating up all the competition, hence why we were working so hard before, but…no, it’s all lighting, for this week at least. Lighting is fun, in its own way. Got to say, some of these commercial lighting solutions around Melbourne are looking pretty nice. Right here and now we have this really harsh set of lights that don’t really do much for looking at a computer screen all day. Like, really…’white’ light? I don’t know how to describe it.

Actually, the change of pace seems to be doing me some good. I haven’t been sleeping well (maybe it’s the weird office lighting messing with my sleep cycle- now it all makes sense!), and otherwise things have been…well, stressful. Not that looking at lighting is necessarily mundane- there are some really interesting types out there, and then I stumbled onto the lighting exhibition page- but it’s more relaxing than our usual work. Than MY usual work, also.

We’ll have to get back to things at some stage, though, otherwise the office is going under. Seriously, I’ll have to mention something to the new boss. He’s really friendly and seems to need a lot of guidance, so…maybe I should chip in. Commercial lighting solutions all taken care of, boss. Let’s get back to some real work now?

-Mack

If you really take a step back and look at what’s going on in this office, you’d probably get confused really quickly. It’s hard to keep up, because on one hand you’ve got the boss’ PA who basically runs the place behind his back and is trying to turn us all into drones, and then there’s Jared the fun captain (or something) who is actually doing a good job at the exact opposite. He’s such a nice guy, I don’t think he realises how much Sandrine is constantly giving him daggers from across the office. I have to hand it to him; the place WAS dull before he got here, if really efficient. Now we all have our magnetic name badges, special meetings and then there’s that wall where we all write down something we’re striving for and the office does their best to make it happen, once per month.

The name badges were pretty great, though. Even I didn’t notice that was something missing, and here I was toiling outside with landscaping and all that. Nope, we just needed to know each other’s names. I guess I really fall short a little bit when it comes to really getting down to personal relationships, because I feel like it’s something I should’ve seen a bit sooner. If I’m going to be a leader one day…well, I know I’m going to be a leader one day. You can’t just be barking orders and ordering tactical strikes; it’s all in the smallest little details that keep morale going in the face of overwhelming odds.

Sorry, what was I saying? Anyway, yeah, custom name badges. I made mine a kind of gold-yellow, since I feel like I can work with that colour. It’s nice how we all have something that unites us, even if it’s just that little bit different. Jason might not be the fun captain the office expected, but he sure is the one it needed. Now I just have to keep a lookout, because by the looks of things, Sandrine is way too close to snapping and flying across the desk, talons bared. That woman, seriously…

-Mack