I haven't been inspired to write a blog post in a little while now! I should have raved about Costa Rica right when we got back, when it was all fresh and I was feeling "la pura vida". It took about 2 days back in the office and to the grind of housework and dogwalks for my pura vida feelings to be swept away in a chilly late winter wind! Le sigh. It really was an amazing trip! Vacations are so fantastic to simply relieve yourself of stress, routine, and life for a solid week! :)
I thought I'd write about something more topical today, and just briefly - a farewell to my work's current Guelph office as this week we are relocating to the what I like to call "hip" (making me decidedly un-hip) downtown of Guelph. We're going to be in the offices in the upstairs of the Old Quebec St. mall, meaning that I can WALK to some great places like Capistrano and Eric the Baker.. not to mention my bank.. a convenience store.. clothing stores.. oh my... and who knows what other fun spots I'll find downtown.. a place where I hardly spend time anymore!
This is a not so romantic ode to our office at the Orchard Park office centre, located in the Ignatius Jesuit Centre just on the northern boundary of Guelph heading up Highway 6 past the curling club.
Positive things:
- free parking
- nice cross country ski trails to ski on during lunch in the winter
Negative things:
- the dead flies that swarm the office in the fall, looking for shelter from the cold.. why are there so many places the flies can get in? they frequently line our windowsills, or cling to our ceilings and die there, forever frozen standing upside down...
- the dog pee stains on the carpet - having a dog-friendly office was a lot of fun for when the trained dogs visited.... not as much the others.... In the summer, the carpet heats up so much you can smell a vague pee-like odor rising from it like a vapour
- heat in the winter is always on full blast (if it's not, you're shivering and can't feel your fingers) so you're mainly sweating and wearing t-shirts in January - the radiators have no control knobs on them so you have to open your window for relief (I work for an environmental charity, this is painful!)
- there is no air conditioning.. not like it doesn't work.. there just is none. Hot winters, hot summers. Who wears short shorts? All of us employees, on 30C days in the summer is who!
- my co-worker's office always had slight suspicious water damage. This year, his ceiling caved in on him
- my same co-worker's office had bats found in it.. three times.. just his office though. Bat bait?
- a Mourning Dove made a nest in the air conditioner window shaker in the printer room and you could regularly hear it cooing
- our storage shed was home to many mice, who regularly ate the granola bars that we stored there for volunteer events
- for over 7 years that I was there (we had the office for a good 5 years before that) raw sewage ran out of a pipe in the wall of the storage shed into a drain in the floor - smelled awesome
- the washrooms are unisex - never men/women in there at the same time, but let's just say I'd always wait awhile after the "men" sign had been on the door to go in! ew, boys are just gross
- the washrooms were kept pretty clean, but the entirety of the floor was never mopped, as evidenced by a dead fly that sat in the corner of one of the stalls for over 6 months
- the cleaning service we hired frequently ate my co-worker's gum, hid my fork. and forgot to empty the garbage cans
- it's a 4 story walk up the stairs to our office, with no elevator
- hornets would regularly fly in through the hole in my window, leaving me screaming and running and enlisting my braver coworkers to trap them for me
- on a related note, my coworker Dan once had his office door closed and was on a conference call in the heat of summer so he took his shirt off, when a hornet flew in through his window, stung him in the neck and he couldn't make a noise or run into the hallway shirtless, so he just quietly freaked out like a mime
- lazy half dead flies would frequently fall off the ceiling, or do a kamikaze flight, into my hair and get tangled there.. again leaving me screaming
- the boardroom was always freezing cold or painfully hot, and never the right temperature for a professional meeting which was always good and embarrassing
- Jeff and I took the contract to paint the office in 2010 - it was a stark, prison white before that - we had to press the rollers "not too hard" over areas of the wall so damaged by water that the paint and drywall would just flake off as you went over them. Now it's a lovely blue... but don't touch certain areas, whatever you do!
- not a single thing to buy - a drink, a snack, lunch, any commodity whatsoever - without a 10 minute walk down the shoulder of Highway 6
- the inaccessibility of walking up or down Highway 6 in rush hour. Fun for my currently pregnant co-worker, teetering on snowbanks along the edge of a windy 4 lane 70 km/hr highway, and actually also a favourite on a bike - my former coworker was hit by a truck on her ride to work and I was nearly side-swiped by one last summer!
- the water that comes out of the taps is white, fizzes and tastes deeply of chlorine - delicious!
The sad part is not a word of that list is a lie and I'm probably forgetting things too!
Well....to "hip" downtown indeed!!!! :) Very excited for riding my bike and walking to work to become more regular fixtures of my life. The loss of free parking will be tough, but we'll get by I'm sure! Climate control, potable water, gender-diverse washrooms, clean carpet and a general lack of fauna is going to make our new office feel like essentially paradise!
April 1!!!!!
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