Browsed by
Category: working

Open Office

Open Office

Comments 0 Comment

After days of rain, sunshine is once more pouring in the back half of the office, and the National Airport control tower stands out in high relief.

Unlike my old office, which fronted on an alley and whose lighting was controlled by whichever truck happened to be unloading at the time, this new office is like a vacant piece of sky.

Clouds, wind, rain — the place is open to all of these, and as such it takes on the character of the day. On rainy days the place feels cozy, almost like a big house where you stop and chat in the kitchen.

On sunny days, like today, it feels closer to the sun and clouds than the interior world of elevators and conference rooms. It’s a little like a tree house, with the same openness to trees and wind. The windows and the reflected light, the glass and steel — they all bring the outside in.

After Labor Day

After Labor Day

Comments 0 Comment

How quickly one gets used to the unregulated life. Even though last week’s wedding preparations kept me crazy busy I was able to complete the tasks on my own time and in my own way. The work world demands a regimentation I’ve taken great pains to avoid.

It’s why I became a teacher after college graduation. I figured out that I could stand nine highly regulated months if I could have three highly unregulated ones to make up for it.

Today I feel the back-to-work burden in my soul. Maybe it’s because I’m still half-exhausted from the wedding. Or maybe it’s because on the day after Labor Day, the traditional back-to-school day, regimentation is in the very air we breathe.

Since I just completed a major project it feels like this should be at the beginning of relaxation not the end of it.  But when the work engrosses, these feelings pass. And it will. I just have to give it time.

Making Waves

Making Waves

Comments 0 Comment

These are crazy days. Buying cases of wine at 9 p.m. Forgetting my lunch.  Making lists of lists.

Still, the mind observes. Even when in crazy mode, the mind is active, laughing at its own craziness and finding the world an interesting place to be.

This morning on the radio, I heard a segment on artificial waves, how a company has been perfecting them, will sell its technology to indoor wave pools, the estates of sheikhs. Few details of this report have remained in my brain, but one phrase did. “We’re carving water,” said the wave creator.

The poetry of that sets the mind to spinning.  An ultimately futile task, one would think. And yet someone makes a living from it.

What do you do? I make waves.

Morning Walk, Evening Prayer

Morning Walk, Evening Prayer

Comments 0 Comment
From this …
To this … 

Metro closures have one silver lining. They push people out onto the streets where they might actually … walk!

That’s what I did this morning, hoofing it from Pentagon City to Crystal City — which is not the metropolis-to-metropolis trek that it sounds like but a mile-long stroll.

It was the best way to start a day, even in this heat and humidity. I plugged in my earbuds and took off. I passed the bustle of Metro, crowds surging on and off of shuttle buses, then turned left on 15th Street, seeking shade wherever I found it.

In my ears, “When at Night I Go to Sleep,” also known as “The Evening Prayer” or “Abendsegen” in German, a lovely melody from “Hansel and Gretel” by Engelbert Humperdinck. For some reason I played this melody when I got off Metro a stop earlier in the city and walked from Chinatown to the Law Center. So it has become my go-to walking-to-work piece.

And it is blissful, calming music. Full and rich, perfect for tuning out the world while at the same time plunging into it. I arrived physically wilted but mentally charged. Maybe I’ll get off a stop early more often.

Back to Vienna

Back to Vienna

Comments 0 Comment

A brief lull for Orange Line riders in Metro’s Safe Track program (I can’t believe we’re all calling it that! what a triumph of marketing?) allows me to come and go through Vienna. I was almost going to say “my beloved Vienna.”

Maybe that’s a bit too strong, but such is the lure of the familiar and comfortable that I almost thought of it that way this morning. There is the familiar parking garage, open and above-ground unlike the one at Wiehle-Reston. There is the bridge over 66, the newspaper hawkers, the buses roaring to their bays.

I got to take the morning drive along Vale and Hunter Mill Roads, the road muggy and shaggy with summer, the turns a delight.

It was only a commute, but it felt like a homecoming.

Metrovoidance!

Metrovoidance!

Comments 0 Comment

On a week when I originally thought I’d be riding the train again I’m back on the bus. A closer reading of Metro’s scheduled shut-downs and closures showed that I’d be unable to make a connection I need to make to reach the office.

The bus isn’t a bad option; in fact, it’s better in many ways. But the schedule is limiting and it makes for quite a scramble in the morning. No more bucolic drives to Vienna via Vale and Hunter Mill Roads.  No more give in the day. It’s regimented from beginning to end.

But the change does one very big thing: It keeps me off Metro. And around here, that’s the new name of the game.

The general manager recently pleaded with riders of three affected lines to find alternative transportation. The patchwork system of shuttle buses could only support 30 percent of the usual daily riders, he said. According to yesterday’s reports, that’s about what happened. Seventy percent of the people who usually ride those trains found other ways to work or telework.

So Metro has become a public transit system without a public. And my commute, like so many other people’s, is all about Metrovoidance!

(Metro during the “Safe Track” program: They don’t keep those lights low for nothing!)

Glass Houses

Glass Houses

Comments 0 Comment

I work in a box made of glass. Glass windows, glass doors, glass walls. I worry that one day I’ll be daydreaming and walk right into one of them. Where are bird stickers when you need them?

The glass begins in the lobby, where two sets of clear doors must be pushed or pulled to enter or exit. The lobby is so bright that I slip on my sunglasses the minute I step out of the elevator.

The glass continues upstairs where it’s easy to see who’s in or out, who’s meeting or on the phone. It’s that kind of place, which is to say transparent and modern and open and good. We’re all the same here, the glass box seems to say. We understand each other. We do not throw stones.

Except that the writer in me wants to be tucked away in a study carrel on the least used floor of the most arcane library in town. The writer in me wants shelter and coziness, dim light and nonreflective surfaces.

Absorption

Absorption

Comments 0 Comment

Mornings have changed since Metro began its Safetrack program. (Safetrack could also be called Slowtrack, or, more appropriately, Slowtrain.) I rush to leave the house in time to get a parking place at a lot that fills completely before 6:30 a.m.

It’s not a peaceful way to start the day, but it is what it is.

And so I begin to see this work space, overhead-lit and open as it is, as an oasis of calm. There are the windows pouring light into the room, and there is the fact that until about 8:12 the overheads remain off. There are the small, clattery sounds of other people arriving, getting settled, making coffee. And there is, most of all, the work.

When it’s interesting (as it often is here), the calm continues as the day wears on. Because there’s nothing so quieting as absorption.

Frost Free

Frost Free

Comments 0 Comment

I once heard — and never forgot — that May 15  is our frost-free date in northern Virginia. For that reason, I don’t put annuals in the ground until Mother’s Day or later. This year I was especially careful, given our cool rainy spring.

So it was only last weekend that I bought begonias and impatiens — and even then, I hesitated. I potted the begonias on Saturday, but Sunday night’s temps were expected to drop into the 30s, so I waited till last evening to plant the impatiens. They are tender things, and need the best start in life.

The whole exercise got me thinking about risk and how our acceptance or rejection of it shapes so many choices in life. I’m more conservative as a gardener than I am in other ways. I changed jobs at an age when many others might have stayed put.  I was willing to accept in life what I can’t in horticulture.

Whether this was foolish or wise, I’m not yet sure. But I do know this: In real life, there are no frost-free dates.

Bus Warrior

Bus Warrior

Comments 0 Comment

A new job, a new routine, a new commute. After a couple of long, miserable slogs on Metro, I tried a bus that whisks me from a parking lot in Reston to a stop five minutes from my new office. It will be a godsend — if I can figure out the parking.

Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about D.C. traffic and commuting, it’s that every shortcut has already been found, every new route tried. It hasn’t been designated the second worst traffic city in the nation (bested only by L.A., I believe) for nothing!

But so far I can say this: the bus is a fundamentally different way to travel. It moves you through space above ground, for one thing. I see the white stones of Arlington in military precision. I see the Washington monument looming in the distance when we stop at the Pentagon.

Connections are clearer, the way road leads to road. It’s a good way to begin a new chapter, seeing more clearly, perched high above the fray. Not road warrior but bus warrior.