Where I work
February 22nd 2007 08:38
I keep meaning to describe the area I work in – temporarily.
It’s a real blue-collar industrial area, with dozens of small and large manufacturing and repair outfits, where trucks proliferate and overalls are the common uniform. The white-collar workers - like myself - are well in the minority.
Driving to work in the morning I go up and over the bridge over the railway tracks – the overbridge that runs off Cumberland St and ends up either in Portsmouth Drive or whatever the street is that runs in the opposite direction, past the wharf and Harbour. I am puzzled as to why enormous trucks carrying logs, for instance, go over this bridge. They can barely navigate the turn in from the one-way system and it’s also a tight squeeze as they turn left off in the direction I travel. One of these days the whole bridge is going to collapse under the strain. There’s no reason that I can see why they don’t head straight along the one-way system and then turn off down St Andrew St towards Anzac Avenue, since this is where they come out anyway. The route they take seems to go away from where they want to be only in order to come back again. Crazy. Why not drive on the flat all the way, instead of hauling yourself up and over a narrow bridge?
The building I work in used to be a separate two-storey building. Now it’s been joined onto a more modern single-storey building by a rather useless piece of corridor. There was once a driveway going through there, as one of the managers pointed out to me yesterday, a drive into the enormous yard where all the trucks are parked and the workshops (some of them) are situated. Consequently, as you wend your way down from the office I work in towards the tea-room, which is situated right at the end of the single-storey building, you go from older, scruffy to more modern but not well-designed. It’s a most peculiar place, and not well-designed for working in. Our of-fice, for starters, has glassed-in offices on one side, where the works managers have their desks – most of them barely separated from each other, and all the old style wooden desks. Our part of the office, which has recently been reorganised, has workstations, one after the other down the row: five of them, in fact, and then two more desks on the other side in a kind of bay, which cuts off the was-boss (who’s in there) from visibility with the rest of the staff. Two more glassed-in offices on either side, and then we’re out into a kind of foyer before going into another area where there is another corridor between more glassed-in offices with spacious old-fashioned wooden desks (the sort where you can really lay out your work). The occasional Christmas decoration is still hanging, two months after the occasion. The offices on the right side all lead out onto the yard, so there are doors everywhere.
The rest of this can be found on my other blog.
It’s a real blue-collar industrial area, with dozens of small and large manufacturing and repair outfits, where trucks proliferate and overalls are the common uniform. The white-collar workers - like myself - are well in the minority.
Driving to work in the morning I go up and over the bridge over the railway tracks – the overbridge that runs off Cumberland St and ends up either in Portsmouth Drive or whatever the street is that runs in the opposite direction, past the wharf and Harbour. I am puzzled as to why enormous trucks carrying logs, for instance, go over this bridge. They can barely navigate the turn in from the one-way system and it’s also a tight squeeze as they turn left off in the direction I travel. One of these days the whole bridge is going to collapse under the strain. There’s no reason that I can see why they don’t head straight along the one-way system and then turn off down St Andrew St towards Anzac Avenue, since this is where they come out anyway. The route they take seems to go away from where they want to be only in order to come back again. Crazy. Why not drive on the flat all the way, instead of hauling yourself up and over a narrow bridge?
The building I work in used to be a separate two-storey building. Now it’s been joined onto a more modern single-storey building by a rather useless piece of corridor. There was once a driveway going through there, as one of the managers pointed out to me yesterday, a drive into the enormous yard where all the trucks are parked and the workshops (some of them) are situated. Consequently, as you wend your way down from the office I work in towards the tea-room, which is situated right at the end of the single-storey building, you go from older, scruffy to more modern but not well-designed. It’s a most peculiar place, and not well-designed for working in. Our of-fice, for starters, has glassed-in offices on one side, where the works managers have their desks – most of them barely separated from each other, and all the old style wooden desks. Our part of the office, which has recently been reorganised, has workstations, one after the other down the row: five of them, in fact, and then two more desks on the other side in a kind of bay, which cuts off the was-boss (who’s in there) from visibility with the rest of the staff. Two more glassed-in offices on either side, and then we’re out into a kind of foyer before going into another area where there is another corridor between more glassed-in offices with spacious old-fashioned wooden desks (the sort where you can really lay out your work). The occasional Christmas decoration is still hanging, two months after the occasion. The offices on the right side all lead out onto the yard, so there are doors everywhere.
The rest of this can be found on my other blog.
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