A maze of twisting passages, Part Three

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?
Holmes: To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.
Gregory: The dog did nothing in the night-time.
Holmes: That was the curious incident.
-Silver Blaze, by Arthur Conan Doyle

One thing about the building that seems kind of weird when I think about it is problems we don't have.

For starters, this place is not dingy overall. Computers are newish (even if software isn't). Office supplies are plentiful. My desk chair here is nicer than the chair at my computer at home. Most of the furniture here would not look out of place in a nice law office. (Admittedly, I assume that the desks, shelves and office furniture of my peers would be for interns or behind-the-scenes paralegals or whatever, and only a dozen people in this building have furniture fit for a lawyer in private practice, but still.) My cubicle doesn't give much privacy, but some peoples' cubicles do, and some people have actual offices.

This compares favorably to similar workplaces in private industry, at least in my experience. The one time I went to the home office of my contracting company, it was in worse shape than this. My previous job was in publishing, and the desks there were described as "Soviet-era" for their sturdy construction, dented metal exteriors, and general ugliness. Only the owner of the business had his own office, and most people didn't even have cubicle walls to make their own, just a desk. Computers were more out-of-date there than they are here. People at that previous job would be jealous of my workspace even as they looked down on the larger building.

There are a couple problems here that I didn't mention in previous posts, though. First, the walls, especially in public spaces, take forever to get fixed. Just standing up I can see a bunch of scuffs on one piece of wall where a chair has been repeatedly bumped up against it for years, and a segment of wall with a couple feet of in the plaster or whatever where wiring was removed. Both have been like that as long as I can remember. On a door around the corner there's a gap in the paint where a sign used to be. (Not where the paint was faded; the sign was presumably attached to the door before the paint, they painted around it, the sign was removed.) The paint jobs are even worse on the stairs. There's a huge range in quality of conference rooms: from worse than my own office to better than my boss's boss's office.

All in all, there is widely variation of quality of different things here, and on boring afternoons it's kind of interesting to think about why.