There’s a certain type of old office with the yellow windows, cielings, walls and blinds. Strange stains everywhere and visible ducting all over the place. It feels homely to me. Modern offices feel cold and without soul, lighting is too bright and lacks natural sunlight. The offices of old you get the yellowed softened sunlight showing all the dust particles in the air.
The one i went to was basically empty. Areas cordoned off with a handful of staff left. A random bucket in the middle of the room to catch a leak. Dark corridors and flickery tube lights. I sat in a room with the window open listening to the breeze rustle the tobacco stained blinds.
Anyone else got this absurd feeling or just me?
From the boring point of view of an office worker, who worked in a yellow office with furniture that was older than me…
The renovation of my office was a truly appreciated. Ergonomic tables and chairs, new carpet, actual white walls and getting rid of 80% of the old file cabinets make life so much nicer. I put up a union poster, a painting, two plants and i do not miss the yellow plastic stains one bit.
That i can understand but on the other hand I’m really really weird. The older offices I’ve worked in usually would have weird little sections isolated from everything else and I’d just wander around and pick some random dark corner to work in. This was pre covid when it was full time in the office and it was the only source of joy i could get from my work environment. Naturally workers should not be subject to such awful accomodation its very much a me thing.
The office i refer to in this post had an entire floor cordoned off with tape, spray paint over the windows from years of graffiti casting a strange light across the room and i just picked some random dark corner to work from and i just felt happy for some reason.
Another office i worked in had a mice problem, leaked all the time and was generally falling apart but had sections seemingly unvisited by people that I’d find and just exist there. It also had a floor completely abandoned, I never saw anyone working on it and would sit somewhere accompanied only by the buzz of the lights.
The key theme is emptiness. A crappy building filled with people is just a crappy building but when i find the empty places or its nearing shutting down so mostly abandoned thats when the feeling kicks in. I guess it doesn’t even need to be an old building just an empty one.
But yeah this is very much just some weird part of my brain that vibrates in these environments i don’t actually expect anyone to work in this condition just wondering if anyone is as odd as i am