So it was back to work with me after a little more than a week of vacation, almost all of it spent with just me on my own. (There were a couple of days in there when I don’t think I talked to anybody but the dog, and I went out to dinner one night largely just so I could be around other people for awhile.)
It was kind of a weird day back, thanks to an announcement this morning that our offices will be moving in the spring. Our lease is up, and…well, our offices have never been all that remarkable. We’ll be moving a few blocks closer to Grand Central, maybe a ten-minute walk from where we are now, and these will apparently be a lot more modern, impressive, and moreover built to our company’s specs.
I’m not so keen on the open-plan layout they’re promising — I miss having an office; now I may not even have a cubicle — or of the added distance I’ll have to travel every day. It’s easily twenty minutes to half an hour by foot from Penn Station, which is doable but screws royally with my preferred work schedule. In the afternoon, I leave at 4:30 and get a 4:54 train. That could get tough.
The subway isn’t too much help, despite the office’s proximity to Grand Central. East Side Access, connecting the Long Island Railroad to Grand Central, isn’t expected to be operational until 2016. There’s just no good trains, and none that don’t involve at least one transfer, to get me from point A to point B. And even the bad choices are going to cost me money in Metrocards.
Maybe I really should think about moving. If I lived in Queens, I could take the subway directly in.
That’s a whole other kettle of fish, of course.
Gack! No office or cubicle? I’d go mad. At least with a cubicle wall you can deal with an awkward itch or a messy sneeze without it become performance art.
Or rather, I should say, at least *behind* a cubicle wall.
Too soon to say exactly what “open plan” will mean — word is, we’ll have some kind of partition between desks — but I’m nervous about losing these three and a half cubicle walls.