Moving to a new office!

As you may already have guessed, I am trying to catch up blog posts that I have slipped up on over the past several weeks. So, here's one that I really ought to have put up a week ago.

My work colleagues and I moved into our brand new, yet still under construction, building a week ago. I say still under construction because only the office space of our new building was "completed" (I'll explain the inverted commas in a second). The builders have yet to complete our massive new laboratory space downstairs and our main reception area, lunch room and main conference room. However, my boss' idea was to move in so that we could place a bit more direct pressure on the builders to complete their work faster!

In any case, I packed up all my office things, computer, folders, papers etc. and we had a removal specialist transport them over to our new building on the 18th of Jan. At the same time, my colleagues and I had to get inducted to work in a construction zone so we had to go through a health & safety briefing for ~ 30 mins before being allowed to enter our offices. We have to wear a hard hat, high visibility jacket and safety goggles whenever we walk to and from our office to the main entrance, that too in a circuitous way! It is a little inconvenient, but I find it quite cool (sometimes!) to have these special rules in place for such a simple task.

As we entered our new offices, we were also informed that we would have no chairs for at least a day, fairly spotty air-conditioning, and occasional power and water outages! Quite a list, isn't it? To be fair, we really enjoyed our moving in day because all we did all day was unpack our boxes, and get our computers set up! The only real uncomfortable bits were not having chairs to sit on and not having clean, drinking water (the water coming out of our taps was very bubbly and smelt of paint!).

The next day, our chairs arrived mid-morning to alleviate our seating discomfort (we were sitting on our empty moving boxes in the interim). Some of my colleagues and I went out shopping for simple kitchen things like a microwave, some mugs and plates, cookies, milk, mineral water etc. and later that afternoon, our office began to resemble a place we would be comfortable working in!

On the 20th, we had our printer/copier/scanner machine delivered and installed, and on the 21st, we got a little fridge so now, we are a fully functional office, except that we have to personally keep refilling our stock of cookies, milk, mineral water etc. It is an ongoing challenge, but it has been quite nice to settle into a spacious, brand new office. Now, we wait with bated breath as the rest of the building slowly gets completed. It is going to be an exciting and challenging time as we get all the labs up and running! You can see just a few pictures of my new office here.