I heard the noise today, oh boy

Chris Norton, April 19th 2006, 9:58AM

Aside from the fact that we have Big Brother, deadlines, diets and one hundred different ways to get in touch with people electronically in order to tell them what a crazy fool they were last night, the one thing that distinguishes us modern folks from our ancestors is noise. We're surrounded by it from the minute we get up (I need about five different electronic alarms to wake me up), and the working day is no exception.

At UKFast towers some of that noise is Rich whistling, or Chris pretending to be a pirate. Over there sales and tech are on their phones, over here there's the constant tapping of finger against key. Being in Manchester we've less a sound of the underground, more a gut-wobbling rumble of the overground as trams go past outside. None of this can really be brought to a stop (unless we tape up Rich's mouth), and to tell the truth I think most of us like a little of background sound - myself especially - I hardly ever get the show on the road in the morning without plugging my brain into the iPod.

But there's one source of noise I think that we in the office - and everyone outside of it too - could do without: that din that computers make. As the beasts get faster and faster their fans get louder and louder. We sit pretty near the office's server rack and it's like the constant roar of an angry ocean. My PC at home sounds like an asthmatic hoover - you can actually hear it through the ceiling if you go downstairs. Seems like some manufacturers are catching up - apparently a lot of the new Mac models, for instance, are somebody-somewhere-is-eating-a-Cadbury's-Whisper-quiet - but far too many PCs still produce a wash of background sound that makes it a relief to turn them off. I love machines - in fact, I'm waiting for a terminator-style brutal machine uprising - but sometimes I wish they'd just shut up.

Tags: macs, noise, office, pcs, workplace
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Desktop Psychology

Chris Norton, April 5th 2006, 10:12AM

You can tell a lot about a person by sneaking up to their desk when they're out of the office, rifling through their pockets and messing around on their PC - or, if you're afforded god-like status by virtue of network permissions and the like (and don't mind missing out on the pocket-rifling), you can do so via VNC. Not to say that I've ever done this, but I keep my eyes open and have noticed a few things about my colleagues' desktops.

At the helm of R&D, Daz runs a two-screen behemoth of a desktop. Aside from making me jealous this lets him juggle about ten things at once, and gives him the luxury of running both a 'testing' screen and a 'coding' screen. For a man with such an elephantine memory this system is perfect - as for me, when I try it I'm always forgetting where I've left the mouse pointer.

Like Darren, designer Rich favours a CRT monitor over TFT. Being a design bod and thus obsessed with Pantone references and the like, he needs the superior colour reproduction. Rich has only the one monitor, but to make up for this he has it set to a resolution that means the biggest 72pt text comes out eye-bleedingly small. When he's not battling with his weapons of choice, Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Photoshop, it's always amusing to send Rich an email and watch him peering at the screen trying to decipher the small print.

My next door neighbour Giles likes things much like I do - highly customised. He has that whole 'Windows taskbar on the top of the screen' look going on (a case of Mac OS envy?), and a set of wallpapers drawn from his current work on Airwaves-Ducati, all carefully tailored in his beloved Gimp.

Desktop wallpaper is one of the most revealing components of your setup - if you're going to customise one thing, normally the wallpaper is it. Next to Giles, Laura has an inexplicable picture of some men with some fish. Jonathan has a picture of his little god-daughter, last time I looked Rob in sales had his dog, and his manager George has some kind of fantasy island. Work, fish, family, pets and holidays - all subjects that pop unbidden into our minds during the course of a working day.

Myself, I have a jarringly minimalist Windows environment that's been tweaked and fiddled with as much as is humanly possibly. There are no icons on the desktop itself. None! This tends to upset anyone who tries to use my PC, and in turn that pleases me greatly. It's mine, get off (NB. this attitude can backfire when you need to ask tech support to fix something). It's a very different approach from that of someone like Daz or Laura, plastering files across the desktop, using it as another inbox. I have my quick shortcuts to Ultraedit, Firefox and Filezilla in my taskbar, and all documents are hidden away in rigid directories. It's anal, and perhaps a little contrary - but it's me, and I love working in my way.

As for desktop images, if Jonathan has a picture of his goddaughter, well, he's a people person. So Giles must be an aspirational type, with his pictures of superbikes, and George is thinking ahead to his honeymoon. If this is all so, I'm not quite sure what my collection of wickedly grinning Terminator pictures says about me...

Anyone else care to psychoanalyse through the medium of the desktop?

Tags: desktop, windows, workplace
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Office 06

Chris Norton, April 4th 2006, 11:15AM

My friends, we're living in the future. We can communicate with people across the globe as if they were in the next room, we can annoy people on the train with a vast array of portable noise-making devices, and we can access just about the entire sum of human knowledge from our desktops. So why are we still working in offices?

It hardly seems surprising that there's a game coming out called 'Office Massacre' (well, at least there was) -the cultural consensus seems to be that the office is a hellhole full of David Brents and broken dreams. Furthermore, over the years we've heard again and again that technology will let us all work from home. So why am I sitting here in a high-tech company that mainly runs from an open-plan office? Shouldn't we all be wired up to the matrix, holding meetings in a virtual space straight out of Tron and disconnecting occasionally to watch Neighbours at our leisure?

Well, from the technology side of things, yes, I could be working at home. But I'd be at a further level of remove from the team we have here. Communication is everything, and spontaneous communication is essential in this work. As I mentioned in my first post, I want to produce usable stuff, putting the emphasis on people. There's no better way to balance the highly abstracted coding my department has to do than to stick us right in the middle of a busy office. We can see what sales are up to, we can hear what tech support are telling the people who use our systems, we don't always need to formalise the process with meetings and phone calls, we're in it.

And the social side of things is much better than they'd have you believe, the writers of The Office or those smug rock stars who 'just couldn't bear the anonymity of office work'. Maybe we're lucky here with this mix of characters, but come on, who doesn't enjoy a bit of gossip? We're all social animals, even those of us who know what AJAX stands for and can happily spend an hour solid quoting Tarantino movies, and here we all are in a big room where we can easily decide to go to the pub after work - and if I was working from home I'd never get a chance to steal Giles' crisps.

Tags: conversations, internet, meetings, office, workplace
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