Posts Tagged ‘office’

I am working with Sky Sports at the moment, who recently relocated their office to Leeds Dock. They are encouraging everyone to talk about how good it is, so here is my contribution.

It was a smooth transition and everything is up and running. It was only a few months between signing the lease and moving in, so there is still plenty to do. It will be great when we get the other buildings up-and-running to give us additional meeting space.

It is a nice location and you get a good view of the dock.

That floor is as slippy as it looks. You can pick up a huge amount of speed on the new chairs: great for chair racing. You can also see that there is no roof. This is the same across the entire building. Everything has been left exposed, which is a design feature. There are screens everywhere, so you feel like you are in the future.

Noise levels were quite high initially but it seems to be calming down now. There is also a cafe that Sky subsidise. So for example, I can of pop that would be £2.50 on the high street is £1.00 in the cafe.

Whether it quite puts us up there with Google and Facebook as one of the best campuses in the world, I suspect probably not. But it is a cool place to work. And ultimately it is the people that make Sky a great place to be.

Many of you will know the feeling. You arrive in the office blearily eyed on a morning and collapse into your chair. But something is wrong. Someone has messed with your chair. The chair you spent ages getting just right. Who would do this? WHO?!?

The anxiety builds inside of you, you just want to rip out their organs then force feed them to them while their family watch on. And the injustice, the sheer injustice of it, is that if you were actually to do this, even after they had deliberately messed with your chair, you would be the criminal in the eyes of the law!

Oh, just me then?

On a serious note though, who are these people that mess with your chair settings?

I have a new theory. After discretely marking each chair in my office I noticed that when I got in after the weekend, different chairs were in different places. Perhaps it is an innocent explanation and the cleaners just move them all to one side, vacuum, and then try and put them back as best they can.

I didn’t actually do that, but I do leave my hoodie on the back of my chair and noticed it had moved a desk down when I got in. It seems quite diligent for the typical standard of office cleaning to actually move the chairs, but it is the simplest explanation.

This supplants my previous theory that it was someone who used my chair while talking to someone else and were annoyed by the settings so changed it, even though they were only using it for two minutes and had no right to mess with it. You would have to be a complete dick to do that but then we know people are when they can get away with things as the state of any office toilet often attests to (again, who walks away without flushing? What kind of traumatising childhood did you have to allow your conscious to do that?).

I think the next step is to deploy a discrete survillence camera, or perhaps buy some camoflague gear from an ex-army supplies store and stake it out.