November 18, 2004
Dear Everyone:
About ten years ago, my job required that I spend
half my time in
Now the situation is slightly different. My office is in “Pleasant Hill”, but my job is in “Pleasanton”. And gradually, I’m acquiring two of everything again. However, the office in “Pleasanton” is not just mine, it belongs to all of Global Records Consulting (GRC). Any one of us can use the office on a first come, first served basis. It’s just that I’m usually the one who’s there.
This office is on the second floor of a building that “Jeannie” has dubbed, “Big Rabbit 3”. The office complex isn’t really called Big Rabbit 3 (or BR3), but who cares? It’s close enough for govmint bidness.
The Big Rabbit 3 office is actually a corner office. Some people consider this prestigious. It faces south and west. It has a view of the parking lot. And it gets the sun almost all day.
In the summer, this is not really a problem, except in late afternoon when the setting sun is shining directly into the room. However, by late October the sun is no longer “overhead”; it is low enough over the horizon to shine into the room all day long.
Did I mention that Big Rabbit 3, like many of the Big Rabbit buildings, is very shiny? It has mirrored surfaces everywhere. The outside window ledges are all mirrored. The inside window frames are some kind of burnished metal. “Jeannie” tells me that architects design buildings this way so that they are cheaper to heat in the winter. Whatever.
Because it is a corner office, it has two sets of
windows at right angles to each other.
At
And this is with all the blinds shut.
For a person with light-sensitive eyes, this is not a happy place.
There’s not much point in asking the building managers to do anything about it. It’s not my office all of the time. And we’ll be moving out around the beginning of March. If it were up to me, I’d just paint the windows black and be done with it. But my supervisor sometimes works there and he just loves the “view”. Opens every blind even if he has to climb up on the desk to do it.
It’s especially difficult around
About three weeks ago, I was so desperate that I went and tore off some blank flip chart pages and taped them together and tried to tape them over the window frames. It helped a little.
That weekend, at our hairdresser’s place, something similar happened. She has converted her garage into a salon of sorts. Each time we go to get our hair cut (and colored) we get to see what improvements she’s made since the last time, as well as how the landscaping is progressing. (A matter close to “Jeannie”’s heart.)
This time, she mentioned her plan to get a moveable screen to place in front of the window, so the light won’t come in and reflect off the floor. That’s when I realized that what I needed in the Big Rabbit 3 office is some kind of a screen. One that I could use to block the worst of the sunlight, and move away when others are using the office and want to see the “view”.
There’s a place in “Livermore” that I go to whenever I need a box of an unusual size or shape. I thought I’d try there first. When I explained the situation to the woman who runs the place, she was very sympathetic because she herself suffers from light-sensitive eyes. We found a sheet of cardboard that was 36” by 72”. It looked like it was worth a try, but how to get it into my car?
We experimented with scoring the cardboard across the middle, then folded it over. That would fit. Then we straightened it out again. It immediately began to sag where it had been scored. When I suggested that a second, smaller piece of cardboard, taped over the scoring would reinforce it, the woman gave me the second piece for free.
The following week, I brought the cardboard into the Big Rabbit 3 office. The sun was already peeking around the corner. I had to shorten the sheet a bit to make it fit, but in a little while I had a “screen” that sits on the window sill (which is fortunately rather deep) and extends a few inches above the window. It worked. And, being relatively light, I could slide it along the sill as the sun moved across the windows. It doesn’t block everything, but it’s a big step in the right direction.
In fact, it works so well that we’ve only had about two or three sunny days since I brought it in.
No Letter next week. Everyone have a safe and Happy Thanksgiving.
Love, as always,
Pete
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