Tag Archives: Working

Easy to me…

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I meant to post this earlier, but my writing time has been limited lately. Too many hours at the computer doing the day job. Working 50 or 60 hours a week is taxing.

I don’t talk a lot about my day job here. In part this is because I want to keep this space separate from what I do for a paycheck everyday. Having separation and balance is vital to maintaining a healthy self. Blurring the lines between home and work spaces is a new thing, but not necessarily a good thing. We’re in the midst of learning how to set boundaries and use these amazing tools constantly at our literal fingertips.

The day job. I’ve worked in commercial architecture for more than two decades now (almost three if I’m being more honest). The work is creative, mentally taxing and rewarding. At the end of the day you can (if you’re close enough to the project site) go to a place, point at it and say, “I was part of that”. I am part of a team that solves complex three dimensional puzzles and draws out the answers on a daily basis. I have logged thousands of hours at this.

As part of my work I browse a number of articles, news stories, and magazines related to my field. I have seen a number of variations on science fiction-esqe buildings and cities and beyond in recent years. Not that these visions didn’t exist before, it’s just easier than ever to create something vivid and eye catching then share it around the world in an instant. This trend has been ramping up recently with the expanded use of artificial intelligence based tools. Type some words, feed the machine some images and get all sorts of pretty, pretty pictures. This is wonderful for making splashy ideas. AI does not mean easy.

In all the years I’ve worked in the commercial field – and that’s an important distinction here – I’ve never seen any structure succeed without the efforts of a team. Small shops, residential work, local additions are easier for the solo practitioner. At a certain point the scale and scope of required work gets far beyond what one person can handle. There is simply too much to detail. This is the ultimate group project.

Taking on a project with the number of things tied into a whole city is no small undertaking. It is in fact, the opposite. It’s massive and daunting. Multiple buildings and all the things associated with getting a structure built is the work of a huge number of people. Getting locations, districts, connections, utility functions and all the things we don’t routinely think about in well established places ready and mapped out is huge. Having a pretty, pretty picture of your dream is great. You need more than a dream, you need a clear vision coupled with a significant amount of studying urban dynamics, infrastructure and a host of other things.

I applaud people who really do have that clear vision. True visionaries are rare. Many times that vision fails to survive the process of being made real. What we do is great in pictures, but it is certainly not easy. I don’t know who Akon is, but he’s not the only one who’s had an idea and it hasn’t gone anywhere. What the people in my field do is important to the health, safety and welfare of the people who live, work and play in and around our works. Some of the best of these works are amazing and unforgettable structures that can move you emotionally with their beauty.

It’s more than a pretty picture. The picture, the idea is the starting point. That’s when the real work starts – and it is as creative, artistic, businesslike, and challenging as anything else.

I hope the ideas and the grand visions continue. We need that in our world. We also need to do the work to make it real. Check out the article here.

Being Back

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I’ve survived the first week back in the office since the global pandemic shut things down. It was as surreal as I suspected it would be. It was going through the same motions as before, but with something missing. While working from home I used all the discipline I had to stay on the same schedule I had when I was leaving the house and going to the office (thankfully). Getting up at ‘the regular time’ and getting ready for work wasn’t really any different.

Leaving the house was different.

There’s normally a level of activity and noise that are going on in the neighborhood where I live. In the mornings on the way out the door there’s a feeling, a sense that aligns with people going through their daily routine. There are cars I recognize from the area, delivery trucks, buses and all sorts of… well, people. This past week did not have that feeling. It was weirdly quiet when I left of the office. Traffic around the house was down to a handful of cars at the most. It wasn’t terrible, it just gave this sense of something being off.

It became more pronounced once I crossed the bridge. The state capitol building is literally two blocks from my office. It’s always busy on all those streets and alleys during a business day. Three lanes solid to or from either highway, trucks, buses, delivery drivers of greater variety… and none of them were there.

Sure, there were other cars on the road. There are a large number of people that fall under the tag ‘essential worker’, but it was nothing like it was before. I have always attempted to get a feel for the ebb and flow of when traffic was the heaviest and slip in between those times. Some days worked better than others. This week? This week it didn’t matter. I was at the office in what seemed like mere moments.

The biggest thing about actually being at the office? Inconvenience.

Yes, you read that right. We have a relatively small staff with ample social distance. There’s nobody else even sitting in the room I’m in while I’m at work. I’m back on the beefy work computer and connected to the servers. I’ve got two wide screen monitors and all the bells and whistles. So, what inconvenience? Everything is closed. Our communal kitchen with the microwave is closed. The water cooler is shut down. The ice machine is closed off with the kitchen. The restaurants around us are super limited in choice and delivery options. It has actually made certain aspects of getting work done more challenging. I didn’t have to worry about where and how I was going to get some water during the day. I didn’t have to give a second thought to lunch when I was home – I could stroll into the kitchen and get it. It’s odd, but it’s almost like being back in the time when I worked for a construction crew and we had to have a thermos and a lunch box because there were no amenities. Sure, our bathroom is WAY better than a port-a-potty (or a shrub), but it’s almost as if I’m back at a construction site inside the office. If you don’t have it with you, it doesn’t happen until you’re back home.

It took a day or two of adjustment along with a corrected grocery list, but I think I’m back on track and ready for things to start picking up. Construction is underway and requests for all manner of paperwork and sketches are flowing again. Hopefully people will continue to be safe and we’ll get things up and really moving again soon.

Working on Working

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Make no mistake, writing is work. I know there are people out there who throw down thousands upon thousands of words and they just seem to flow out of them, but even for those people this is work.

I’m beginning to get myself back to a creative place and be able to do this work more regularly. This is a boon for actually putting words up here. Sometimes there are extra words that don’t actually fit in the stories I’m working on and they slop over the side of the cup. On good days I can mop up those words and squeeze them out into something vaguely coherent here.

Sometimes those words just leave a ring shaped stain on my desk.

The most difficult times are when I really want to lay down a screed about something that has caught my attention in the news and I just don’t have the ability to get here and do it. It’s a spoon thing for folks that subscribe to that analogy. I just run out of spoons.

A good example of this is the latest Star Wars film. I went to see it on opening day. I was at the theater for the earliest show. I went early and had my favorite seat, right in the middle in the middle. Popcorn in hand I was on board to see more Star Wars!

I watched it. I was confused by so many parts of it. It was big, it was splashy and decidedly a “need to see it on the big screen” kind of film. That was the best thing I could say for it. There were a ton of clearly fan service moments in there. There were a ton of really questionable story telling choices. I would honestly need to see it again just to parse out all the weird combinations of stuff that either did or didn’t work. What I really needed to do at the time was jump on here and write all those things down while they were fresh in my mind…

And here I am a month later mentioning that I wanted to talk about it.

Would the words still be relevant? The moment is past. There are a half dozen other things that have come up and made waves since then. There are tons and tons of reviews in either direction (love it or hate it ~ take your pick) and my take would be a rehash of various parts of a lot of them. I didn’t get to the work in time.

That actually brings up another point. Work. I like putting my thoughts up here and having a place where I can land all this stuff that is my own. It’s my web site ~ I own it. I will put what I want up here, when I want to put it here and not worry if some massive company is going to accidentally “ban” me for a month or whatever. It’s my own and I will do as I please. It is my own, and this doesn’t pay. All these words are free and sometimes I need to focus on the words that pay. I will be the first to tell you that they don’t pay well, but they do pay (from time to time).

So I’m going to continue to work. If you’ve meandered with my train of thought all the way to the bottom of this ~ thank you. I appreciate that you’re reading. I’m off now to hammer out some more of those words that are supposed to pay.

If you’d like to see a really amusing take on all sorts of aspects of the most recent Star Wars film that didn’t really work head on over to YouTube and check out Pitch Meeting. I thought it was more than funny, it was pretty right on.