The Office

Today I had to go into the office to get some work done; I didn't really feel like breaking my holiday up, but with some urgent deadlines at the start of next month I needed to do something, rather than risk the chance of standing next to a smoking crater with a guilty look on my face in two weeks' time.

Every two years I've returned to London, and every two years my company moves offices in London. I'm sure it would be cheaper and less disruptive of business for them to just tell me I shouldn't come round any more, but they persist in this. The previous move was from the very convenient, but horrendously cramped confines of Soho Square, to what appeared to be an enormous, spacious office in Covent Garden. In less than two years they outgrew that space, and decamped to Islington, to an amazing building near Angel tube.

From the outside it was a large cube of glass; the insdie was really wonderful - every meeting room is decorated differently, the walls are large blocks of white or exciting colours, and everywhere you look there's pleasant sights, whether it's the cheery slogans on the walls or the not-too-bright colours of the desks, or the coffee machines that don't spew caffeinated bacterial broth when you ask for an espresso.

I'm not sure if the forces of entropy and age will bring it down to some fetid level in a few years time, but right now it's a very pleasant place to work.

As long as you remember to bring a laptop that you can actually dock into the workstations, and not like me be stuck craned over your keyboard all day long, getting home at 8 with a neck that's bent three times over and thus incapable of much except for lying on your back and staring up at the ceiling. I may not be in the gutter, but I'm seeing stars.

I worked flat out all day, wrestling recalcitrant spreadsheets into some semblence of order, which probably means I have nothing of any great note to relate that wouldn't transgress some non-disclosure agreement or otherwise contravene the terms of my continuing employment, and I do rather like having money every month to feed my landlord and my credit card, so I will cease at this point. I'll just point out that the Misery Line up to Euston was not as horrible as I remembered, and that although the underground train carriages are bigger in Hong Kong than London, fewer people were trying to stuff themselves into my personal space this morning, so perhaps it wasn't as bad as I made out yesterday after all.