Work Is Criminal...Courthouse

For the most part my life these days has been revolving around work (IE we haven't been traveling a ton just yet, though the summer is almost upon us), so I thought I might try to paint a clearer picture of what that means for all of you.

Every morning I get up, shower, brush my teeth, shave, floss, dress, and lock the door on my way out. The walk to work takes about 20 minutes. Some days I listen to music, some days I just think. I have a bowl of cereal while I watch my computer shutter to a start and the slow squeaky grind of AutoCAD getting off its feet. Then I more or less draft...the process of drawing beautifully accurate vectors on a glossy glass screen via commands and letters tapped out on the keyboard...all day long. Some times I'm drawing something interesting, but most of the time I'm just drawing something. Something that needs to be drawn, for whatever reason, whether it seems useful or not.

This all starts at 9:00am. At 11:00 am I take a tea break, where I drink half a cup of coffee. Then lunch at 1:00 pm, usually consisting of a salad or sandwich, made by yours truly. We have ample refrigerator space at work, so I typically just pick up a weeks supply of food on the way to work Monday and I'm set. At 4:00 pm another tea break where I try not to drink another coffee because somehow that second half a cup seems to push my stomach over the edge. At breaks I am often joined by my friends at work where we talk about everything from world politics, to cracking jokes, to flat out bitching about work.

At 5:30 pm I leave...hopefully. I had never worked overtime before coming to Ireland. Kind of ironic, I know, but on this project it is just necessary sometimes...often.

The project is the new Dublin Criminal Courthouse. All in all a very interest project, a courthouse. Unfortunately by the time I got involved (otherwise arrived in Ireland) the project was well past the initial design phases (from here on known as the "fun part") and largely steeped in development and production documentation. This is the part of the project where it goes from being just another pretty picture to being a real thing.

Invariably complicated, with at least six different groups of people using the building - Judges, Jurors, Criminals (or at least accused criminals), Facility Management Staff, Solicitors and Barristers (otherwise know as lawyers), and Joe Public - all of which requiring separate paths of circulation (for their own safety of course), culminating in a meeting within the courtroom itself. Added to that all of the other security concerns and safety precautions, topped off by the building being shaped like a donut...

Yes...a donut. My take on dramatic geometry in buildings is to only do it when absolutely necessary (IE when the design foundation for the building makes it the best and most appropriate solution), because it inevitably makes everything more complicated, more expensive, and often leaves some pretty nasty leftovers. Unfortunately, in this case, the decision was rooted in a good design foundation (I'm not going to bore our non-architecty readers with this, but they had thought about it a good bit beyond "it looks cool"). Not only did the shape have to be complicated, but the exterior of the building had to be complicated (this part was more about the look, but makes for a pretty impressive visage, so completely forgivable). So now we have a complicated program with a complicated shape covered by a complicated skin. This equals complicated building.

My part of this tends to be broken into fragments. The project is so big that there are a good ten people working on it full time (one of which is our director and two are the project managers for design and construction), each of us with our own little parts. For a good while I was "section boy." Before that I was "bathroom boy," "jury dining boy," "concrete construction drawing boy," and "balustrade boy." Currently I am "interior glazing boy" and "interior elevation boy." Of course this nomenclature is of my own design. No one calls me "boy" in any sense, but we all end up owning a small piece of the building and that's how my cynical little mind works. No one really knows everything about the building, so if you want to know something about the windows you had better check with "glazing girl," "floor boy," "ceiling boy," and "shading device boy" to make sure you have everything covered. It's a little ball of chaos that somehow seems to balance its way out in a very my-mind-could-shatter-at-any-moment-so-take-cover sort of way.

Note that design was was not mentioned preceding "boy" in any of the above titles. Design being my heart and soul, you could say, I often find my self remotely frustrated by the situation as it stands. Every once in a while it looks like I am getting the opportunity to do some design work, but then eventually someone comes along, takes whatever I did and dumps it over on its head, slaps it on the ass like a newborn, puts a hat on it, and says, "Now go that way." You might be saying to yourself, "That makes no sense, what you just said!" which is exactly what I say (in my head of course) every time it happens. Se la vie...

These days, though, despite the lack of heart and soul, my appreciation for working on a big government project has increased substantially. Recently the Irish economy has dipped a bit from its steady rise, with projects here and there at work going on hold or being canceled completely. This may very well be a result of the US economy's steady decline into the toilet, but Ireland has been sitting on a pretty big bubble for a while now and it might just be time for things to level out. Because of the project MIAs my work has decided to let some people go. They call it making you redundant here. Redundancies. Terminology that just seems like an extra kick in the chops, but that's now how it gets interpreted. It's more on par with the PC nature of being "laid off." Fortunately I wasn't one of those unlucky ones. I'm hoping that the big bad Criminal Courts project with its big bad government budget will protect me for a good bit longer. It looks like It will be OK, but time will tell.

In the mean time I will be drafting away like a diligent worker bee trying to show my bliss in the accurately placed vector. Its interesting how your mindset has to change when you start thinking about what you need instead of looking past that at what you want.