Power to the people - if you can find a spare socket
Where would you like me to insert this?
Something for the weekend, Sir? Changing family circumstances have resulted in my need to use long-distance trains more frequently. They used to call them "InterCity" services back in "the age of the train" but the less said about that the better.
InterCity trains when I was a child were horrible: dirty, uncomfortable and stinking of piss, an odour that could invariably be traced to a drunken Glaswegian at the end of every carriage. Should I be foolish enough to take out my Travel Mastermind - I was never a Travel Scrabble kind of kid - it would later require the use of a bread knife to prise it away from the stained formica British Rail table.
Second Class in the 70s was never like this...
In the 1970s, if you were a grown-up and wanted to do some work on a train, you booked into First Class. There was simply no alternative.
My experience of train travel these past few weeks reveals a much more civilised setup, with comfier seats, air conditioning and a notable lack of lager tins rolling up and down the aisle. And this is Standard Class!
Most important of all, there’s a power socket at every window seat.
I can’t overstate how valuable this feature is. If it wasn’t for their Lilliputian tables and the constant jostling, I’d say trains are more work-friendly than many offices I visit.
Just about everywhere I go, some idiot of an office manager has installed a weird power system with circular pins or other such nonsense in order to stop people from using electricity. Employees are working with an increasing number and variety of portable, battery-powered devices, and have been doing so for at least seven years. Yet office planners still seem to be under the impression that a single inaccessible and non-standard power cable per desk is plenty.
Barely have I stepped into a modern office building than I spy a pair of legs protruding from under a desk as yet another poor sod hunts in vain for some way to recharge their smartphone. When business visitors turn up, the second thing they ask - after directions to the toilet - is where they can plug in their handsets, tablets and notebooks, only to be invited to reach blindly for a socket thought to be "somewhere behind the photocopier" or scrabble around on the floor under the boss’ desk to unplug his mini-fridge.
Even when an office manager has been considerate enough to install power blocks to support multiple devices - eg. a computer and a display - these are tucked away in some kind of angular metal cage arrangement under each desk and designed to dissuade unauthorised interference by tearing bloody chunks from your scalp each time you need to ‘go under’ to plug different something in.
When I can get away with it in other people’s offices, I find or buy a power extension block and run it through the cable-tidy hole in the desktop so that I can have four to six instantly accessible sockets right in front of me. Within minutes, most of these will be nabbed by adjacent colleagues to charge up depleted mobile devices, and visitors ask to use the remainder, whereupon we’ve run out of sockets again.
And so the power-source equivalent of musical chairs plays out in slow motion over the course of the day.
Nor do I put it down to the curse of working in an old building. One of my regular work haunts has seen an entire floor let to a self-consciously kewl startup that chose to fit ‘pods’ of curvy, brightly coloured desks that, looking from above as I ride the escalator, look like giant splats of paint, and the floor has been surfaced with black and white square tiles.
The overall effect is reminiscent of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, with the office staff looking like live-action characters inside an animated link on Cartoon Network.
Can't find a plug socket? Call in the detectives
Yet even they’ve already begun complaining about the lack of power points.
I sneakily suspect this is what it’s like even at famously funky offices like those kitted out by Facebook or Google. Besides, with air hockey tables and Dance Dance Revolution kiosks in every corner, there’s probably no power left for anything else anyway.
It’s enough to drive you to mini-golf… on the roof. ®
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. It doesn’t seem long ago that computer users were complaining about incessant ‘Do you really want to install this?’ prompts. These days, it’s ‘You have only five per cent battery life remaining’ that drives everyone mad.
COMMENTS
The two problems I've experienced with trying to get sockets into offices (Personally, I'm an advocate of get as many sockets of any sort, power, data etc in as possible as you don't know what will come - however, as IT-person, I have very little input into this process, only trying to pick up the pieces later):
* Architects who don't seem to want to cater for anyone actually using their creation. We used one who flatly refused to have ugly power sockets ruining the smooth flow of his walls, and eventually compromised on grudglingly permitting the building to have one accessible power point in the lecture theatre, plus some buried in floorboxes where they were all in the wrong place or inaccessible while the seating was deployed. Sadly I was told that it was prestigious to use this architect and simply telling him that if he couldn't design something that met the requirements, he should sod off and we'd find one who could wasn't an option. (On a previous building, same architect sealed motorised projection screens and lighting into the ceiling with no access panels, and thus no way to repair the motors when they burned out, or even to change the tiny sparkly light bulbs when they blew).
* Office staff who insist when having their office space refurbished, that they will have the desks 'here' and 'here', and a printer 'here', (usually as islands in the middle of the floor) and that they must have power/data to those points with no health-and-safety infringing trailing cables. Then after said points are installed, discover that the new desks they've ordered without measuring don't fit, or they have a rearrangement a week after moving back in, meaning that the furniture is now sitting on top of floor boxes that were the only option, with no way to then access them, while the people whose offices they are moan and gripe about not being able to plug anything in.
Sod the sockets
Most times coming in and out of London I'd just settle for a seat...
That's what building codes are for
"Architects who don't seem to want to cater for anyone actually using their creation. We used one who flatly refused to have ugly power sockets ruining the smooth flow of his walls,[....]"
Here in the US we'd just say "well, sorry, but building codes require an outlet every 6ft on any wall larger than 6ft. If we do it your way, the nice building inspector will not issue a certificate of occupancy and all your nice work will be for naught."
+1 on PAT testing
Try pointing them to this site:-
http://www.hse.gov.uk/myth/july.htm
Re: Round hole sockets?
Agree. As well as the anti-tank function they also have a use as a grappling hook - witness the difficulty on extracting the plug-eng of a lead from a pile of wiring. The best plugs will seek out the nearest wire within 3 feet and lovingly wrap their prongs around it in a vise-like grip.
Phil.
