Day 53: Building 19

Today was The Moving Day.  All of the annotators from the Speech and Language department at BBN were moved to Building 19.  I was later told that apparently "Building 19" has cultural significance, and a quick google search confirmed that there is a chain of stores called Building 19 with the slogan "Good Stuff Cheap."  It's kind of funny and a fairly accurate description of the annotators.  They say that any change in the workplace is good for productivity (no matter what the change is) -- but I'm not totally sure about that.

Let me describe the BBN version of Building 19.  First of all, it's a warehouse--it's where shipping and delivery at BBN resides, and trucks come in to the room next door to drop things off throughout the day.  (At some point, when the fumes were bothering someone, I checked it out with a co-worker, and we were told by a guy in that department that "I sneeze once in the morning but then you get used to the fumes" and that "sometimes we turn a fan on if it gets too bad".)

Anyhow.  Our particular corner of the world in Building 19 is kind of cool.  It actually looks like the room would make an amazing bar (kind of reminds me of the pizza place in Davis that is converted from a warehouse).  There are huge, brightly-painted pipes and scaffolding above us (the ceiling is probably about 16-20 feet -- I'm not great at such estimations!), and rows of medium-sized "cubicles" -- really just desks with dividers between them.  Above the desks are fairly low-hanging rows of fluorescent lights, but the room is so big that the lighting is not actually very depressing.  The girls formerly living in 3/123 (ah, that beautiful building, with offices right next to the library and cafeteria...) snagged the first row, right by the door, with frosted glass panes letting in light (but no peeking!).

They also say that groups of people, even strangers, become closer when they have to go through a hardship -- and probably this almost counts.  So we spent part of the day trying to make the space look nicer by hanging up posters that M. (our supervisor) had scavenged and hanging up some hooks that she'd nagged us for coats/bags/hats/etc.  It's a pretty sweet work environment, if you ask me -- even came with fancy bathrooms (close by, just for us, *and* they have a decent-looking shower and lockers) and a mini-kitchen (full fridge, hot/cold water device of some sort, coffee maker, sink, microwave).

After work, I had a good-but-not-so-cheap dinner with Z. at the Druid, where a friend from my class at MIT met up with us.  We headed down the street to Courtside -- which was the deadest I have EVER seen it -- and then sprinted back to Central to catch a song or two to dance to.  Back to Building 19 tomorrow!

Day 35: Now you see it, now you don't

A feature of Cambridge which seems to creep up on me is how it's constantly morphing.  The street I live on alone has gone through a serious makeover during my four-year tenure to the extent that it feels like I've grown up with it a bit.  Sometimes they come back (as in the case of the hardware store with the cheeky t-shirts with taglines like "Got caulk?"), and sometimes they're gone forever (as in the case of the somewhat sadly misplaced-looking Gap that used to grace the corner of Mass Ave and Essex).  Others (ahem, Phoenix Landing) just change kitchen staff continuously with the result that the tasteless food might be replaced by amazing $4 happy hour burgers, only to sadly be redacted for a new staff who favors $10 burgers with peanut sauce (ok fine I might love peanut sauce so that wasn't really a good example).

Tonight I had a chance to really appreciate this feature as I ended up getting some dinner with friends at Thelonius Monkfish, a new-ish joint just down the road which was the first sushi place to grace the presence of my neck of Mass Ave.  What's more, "Prohibition has ended!" there, as the signs outside proudly proclaim - i.e. they finally got a liquor license.  We clearly had to celebrate with modified sake bombs (the non-college-kid version in which we didn't quite make everyone else in the restaurant hate us because we were yelling and banging our fists).

Finally, we hopped across the street to the newly opened Brick & Mortar, which used to be the Enormous Room -- or, as pretty much everyone I knew accidentally called it, the "Elephant Room", due to the tiny elephant on the door which was the only cue you were entering the correct place [note its absence now in above picture].  I must say that it was kind of sad to see the place go (first bar our grad school cohort gave a nod to, etc.) -- except that the new version is so much better it's like going into Tu y Yo having expected Taco Bell :).