Now look here...
Thursday, June 18th, 2009 12:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caddymanI remember, back in my days in Marsham Street, when the then Department of Environment was contemplating the move to this building, we were told that we should only have certain printers, faxes and other office machines. At that time, back in 1995 or 1996, office IT was a mish-mash of different equipment from a variety of suppliers and each division had its own budget. I was pooh-poohed by a snooty little dwarf of a bloke when I said it was no way to run an IT operation and that even if every other budget was devolved to division level, IT was one that should stay central, even though the risk there was that we would end up with an entire Department stocked with rubbish kit. Since then of course, I have been proven right – we have central IT and we have universally poor equipment, but I still believe the principle is right.
Anyway, I digress.
Some of the printers we had back then were huge flatbed things made by Brother. They weren’t bad pieces of kit for the time, but they were big and they did kick out a fair amount of heat. We were told that following the move over to this building, these printers would be scrapped because the air conditioning couldn’t possibly cope with that amount of heat being generated. We were sold marvellous mental images of clouds forming in the atrium and our own little tropical micro climate, complete with rainfall. I for one thought this was great and we should have gone with it: our own little environmental bubble, a clerical Eden Project for civil servants.
It’s clear that I have been here too long. I don’t think people are supposed to remember that far back. The troubles on the eighth floor, with 30+ degrees and rank fumes are part of it. Colleagues here are beginning to grumble about the temperatures on the first floor now and half of it is empty, being fitted out to get even more people in. Now given that each living body is the equivalent of a single bar electric fire, what’s that going to do to the building’s air conditioning? I am hopeful that we will have our own little rain forest developing in the next eighteen months or so. I hope I can have a fan, though, or some punka wallahs.
Anyway, I digress.
Some of the printers we had back then were huge flatbed things made by Brother. They weren’t bad pieces of kit for the time, but they were big and they did kick out a fair amount of heat. We were told that following the move over to this building, these printers would be scrapped because the air conditioning couldn’t possibly cope with that amount of heat being generated. We were sold marvellous mental images of clouds forming in the atrium and our own little tropical micro climate, complete with rainfall. I for one thought this was great and we should have gone with it: our own little environmental bubble, a clerical Eden Project for civil servants.
It’s clear that I have been here too long. I don’t think people are supposed to remember that far back. The troubles on the eighth floor, with 30+ degrees and rank fumes are part of it. Colleagues here are beginning to grumble about the temperatures on the first floor now and half of it is empty, being fitted out to get even more people in. Now given that each living body is the equivalent of a single bar electric fire, what’s that going to do to the building’s air conditioning? I am hopeful that we will have our own little rain forest developing in the next eighteen months or so. I hope I can have a fan, though, or some punka wallahs.