Commonality of poor office design

I sat at my workstation in the Fish Factor, there were 8 emails from the day before and more were coming in.  It was raining work, I'm only one individual and have just one pair of hands, but still it poured. I kept a tally of the interruptions, there were in excess of 25 of them, where someone wanted to speak to me, on the phone or in person.  It is like I go to work to be interrupted and not do any work while there.  The day was a write off.  It may have been OK for everyone else but for me it was walking up hill in treacle.  It felt like nothing got done.

If office environments are supposed to be places of productivity then this environment could not of been an office.  I believe in the UK we go backwards in the design of buildings for people to work in.  As with everything else the people who are meant to use a building are not consulted, the project teams become selective groups who have power in not just design but finances.  They are amateurs when it comes to creating working environments but it doesn't stop them from going out in the world and purchasing designs and furnishings which are inappropriate.  The buildings look beautiful.  They win awards for all kinds of things, such as energy efficiency, renewing rain water for toilets, the use of glass to allow in lots of light.  The buildings are said to be friendly for the disabled.  However, once you get a group of people and who start to fill the building up the real issues come through.  There is no doubt in my mind architects play a part in this, but there must be a tomb of knowledge somewhere about the failures of office buildings and how they can be improved and made better.  How in the planning stage so much can be achieved to prevent disasters.

I am sure the project masters who designed the Fish Factory had no conception of the noise made when a building which is little more than a multi-story car park is adapted for employees to work in. How the reverberations of chatter carry and bounce of hard concrete surfaces, and do disrupt people, especially those who need to think.  As all the money has been spent on design there is little left for furnishings or noise dampening devices.  So there are times when it is impossible to concentrate, peace is so necessary for some of us.  Consequently less work gets done when the Big Fish want more.  It is a complete contradiction.  An environment is thrown together which does little or anything to help at all.

I expect then to get picked up as I have not met my quotas, it will not matter what argument I put forward.  I'll be in the wrong.  So I'll just sit with my fingers in my ears, or ear plugs, or ear muffs and hope there will be a time where a little bit of work is actually achieved.  Down with the ignoramuses who control everything and know nothing.

Teenage kids and the value of stupid

I am probably old and out of touch with teenage kids nowadays,which is the only explanation feasible due to the way they make me feel.  Over the last week, ever since the school holidays began there's a lot of them about.  Kids in groups, walking about as though they have a hardness gene, which makes them different and untouchable.  Barely out of nappies thinking they are the in thing.  There's a look about them, like a smugness and it makes you feel like getting a baseball bat out and using if for an unintended purpose.  Their behaviour gives the place an awkward feel.  A tension, even though this is perceptual.  Some of them are no doubt bad, most are most probably good.  However, they are all buying into an image and a language.  Yes, a language.  One they hear from music, TV and of a different culture and they adopt it as though it is their language.  It is the new street talk.  It sounds like the ghettos of America.  It is cultural, it relates to a race and group of people who feel the world owes them a living, and also they are bad, they mimic this bad.  It becomes their identity.  When I see and hear white teenage boys acting as if they are from a black, ghetto I see senselessness.  Then wonder whether they want to get a job and work, whether they would go to the interview and talk in the same fashion they are now.  They are unaware, naive of the world and only know their small area.  It seems ignorance is the new in.

What they don't see but I see is the new stupid.  Stupid is what stupid says and does.  The youths are lemmings.  All running towards the cliff edge.  They are creating their own culture when it does not exist.  It seems they want to be downtrodden, they want to act this way because it is their existence.  They are becoming a reality of stupidity.  A reality of a self fulfilling prophecy they see from TV.  The area isn't bad, it isn't so downtrodden it should be downtrodden.  OK this area of London I live in does suffer from poverty, there are social problems, but they are not of epidemic proportions.  Yet the teenagers of this area want it to be an epidemic, they want to make one.  The street and the hood is where their friends are,  it exists because they want it to exist not because it really does exists.  Their full out copying then becomes a real thing.  At which point their pretend fears become real fears.  Real knifes and guns being held.  Real drugs infiltrating what was a relatively secure area.  All because of the school holidays.  This is the world they see young, the space of their birthdays seems to be forever,  they will get older but this is the only moment they see. As if their life will be eternally stuck in the here and now and age is something which will not touch them, because time passing is also inconceivable.

It is sad, frustrating and annoying.  The new good thing is stupid.  It's witnessed when a group of teenagers go walking down the street and in tow is a large pregnant girl.  I wonder if she will be pushing her pram and baby around with her gang, and then for how many days, or weeks.  It is an unfortunate thing.  Teenage girl, pregnant, little education and a stereotype.  Lets not forget to mention they all have frying pan hats, baggy trakky bottoms and badges of ignorance.  Growing up sure will tough for some of them, especially when they find out there's will be more to life.  A little more than the glorification of density.

God help the Queen.