It's official: British offices are the coldest and ugliest in the world
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/201 ... st-in-the/

The only problem with my workplace is dumb-ass management. The actual place is great (plenty of space and light), and I can kinda take some of the credit there lol. Full-on Lego display that people genuinely love, sweets carousel, fans and lights of every description that I've obtained, a half-decent toaster...

In terms of heating, I can only assume it's the women complaining IME - the blokes are always saying it's too warm! There was a study recently where women are typically a few degrees cooler IIRC.

I'm always too warm in offices.
I think more and more people expect their job to be fun and entertaining, because that's how they've been educated. In all jobs there's [LIFTED] tasks that you just have to get on with.


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My office is in a 70's square block that is the last remnant of one of those 'high concept projects' which almost inevitably lead to bad buildings. Every other part of the project has already been demolished apart from one, which is currently being knocked down right opposite my office so I have a daily background chorus of pneumatic drills and angle grinders to accompany my work. The place was apparently designed by Escher. We get people who are literally lost (i.e. they don't even know how to get back to where they started) in the corridor I'd say once a day and at start of term it's verging on one an hour.

All the walls are unrendered breeze block that have been painted custard yellow. Only half the offices have any sort of windows at all, and those windows are (reaches over with a ruler) 5 inches wide.

The air con was designed for a 1970's data centre which part of the building consisted of. That part no longer exists, but the aircon has never been renovated. This means at any given time half the building is freezing cold and the other half is swelteringly hot apart from when the weather is actually sunny, when the whole building is swelteringly hot (temperature in my office according to thermometer, 25.2 degrees).

TL:DR - [LIFTED] yeah.

To be fair, they do have a plan to renovate the building starting in August. That will take 18 months. They're not rehousing us while it happens. They aren't going to redo the building structure - so no change to the windows - but they are going to make things more 'open plan'. So as well as being ugly and uncomfortable, it will also be noisy and distracting. *sigh*

Ah yes, the drive to open plan... usually decided on by people who have their own individual offices and don't have to put up with working in an open plan office.

If British offices are the coldest, I shudder to think what other countries are like. I've worked in way too many places that were absolutely roasting, and the dress code (and basic human decency) prohibited me from removing all clothing bar my boxers. It's doubly annoying when you have women wearing nothing more on their top halves than vest tops then complaining that it's cold </blatant stereotyping>. Put a [LIFTED] jumper on if you're cold.

The horrible ugly offices in the business park I work <sarcasm>

Cold is a good thing. You can easily put a jumper on if you're cold, but it's much harder to cool down if you're too hot.

If ugliness is an issue, just knock down any office built in the 60's. That decade's architecture is a warning from history