Up, up and away! I’m off on vacation to somewhere sunny and warm, the first time we’ve taken a decent trip since the kids were born.
They’ve told me they just want to sit in the sand and play with plastic dinosaurs, which is pretty much all I want to do also. I’m not sure how they’ll handle the flight, the hotel, the food, etc… but we’ll get by.
We did a test trip a few months ago, staying in a hotel for two nights to see how they’d handle it. We arrived at night, and checked in. My youngest was already crashed out, but my eldest stormed into the hotel room and did a quick spot check, inspecting the room and giving both beds a quick bounce. Her evaluation:
“Nice room. Nice beds. No monsters. It’s perfect.”
We wrote that on the “how was your stay” card.
See you in a week.
Well now, here’s a twist.
As you may recall, I’ve been asking my blogging colleagues to count stuff on their commutes to work, in order to see a) what there is to see in different parts of the country, and b) in what directions their warped minds travel when their bodies are stuck in transit.
It’s part b) that is illuminated with frightening clarity in the case of one Joe Mahoney, radio drama guru and self-proclaimed novelist.
Joe’s response to my challenge looks at the commute of the protagonist in the sci-fi novel Joe writes on the train to work each day. It’s a bit like cracking open his skull to see what wiggles out. Try not to run away screaming.
Commuters: Joe Mahoney and Barnabus J. Wildebear
Location: the planet T’Klee, mostly
Commuting time: the better part of a day (subjective time)
Route: An island on the east coast of Canada to a continent on the distant planet of T’Klee
Astonishingly attractive female operatives: 1
Rather attractive female aliens: 1
Strange alien birdlike creatures: 1
Strange alien creatures being eaten by alien birdlike creatures: 1
Houses, abandoned or otherwise: 1
Eerie abandoned alien bases: 1
Streams and rivers: 1
Hostile aliens: 0… um, so far
Portals to other planets: 1
Magnificent alien cats: 1
Humans possibly under psionic control of magnificent alien cats: 1
Large robotic mechanical spiders: 1
Portable artificial intelligence units: 1
Poisonous alien insects: several thousand
Heartbreaks experienced by one Barnabus J. Wildebear during commute: 1
Episodes of paralysis experienced by one Barnabus J. Wildebear during commute: 1
Level of regret experienced by one Joseph Thomas Mahoney upon pulling into Union Station at end of commute every day: Exceptionally high
CBC.ca is movin’ on up, again. To a de-luxe “CBC City” in the sky.
Not the sky, exactly, but the 9th floor of the Toronto Broadcasting Centre, which is high enough. (In the 10 years I’ve been doing new media for CBC, we’ve been on the 2nd floor, then the 8th, then back to the 2nd, now up to the 9th. I was going to title this post something to do with a pendulum, to counterpoint last week’s “The pits…“, but it seemed overwrought.)
CBC.ca - or the “digital media group”, as I’ve just discovered we are being called - is on the vanguard of an enormous redesign project for the 1.72 million square foot TBC. Our move is one of several pilot projects, and we were picked because (among other things) we aren’t tied down to large immovable objects like studios.
The massive, long-term renovation effort, dubbed the “Workplace Revitalization Project,” is - to gush uncharictaristically - simply amazing. It’s smart, consultative, and geared to an understanding of the way broadcasters work. And most of all, it’s based on a vision.
Before I get too excited, it should be stated that the impetus for the project is in large part to make money by renting out even more of our building to paying customers. CBC has a Real Estate Division that has, in recent years, earned the distrust of employees by turning the public broadcaster into a landlord, profiting by shaving inches off my meager workstation and giving the impression of wagging our collective dog rather vigorously.
Unless we’re being had, it would seem the tides have turned just a little.
The most surprising thing about the vision for the redesigned TBC is the frank admission that it’s an effort to right past wrongs.
The Canadian Broadcasting Centre (TBC to us, to specify the Toronto location) was supposed to fix the problems of conducting Toronto operations from more than two dozen smaller locations. It was supposed to be modern, comfortable and efficient. It was supposed to be a place where employees could collaborate, and where the broadcaster could interact with the public.
Through a combination of cutting corners and bad decisions, it failed.
In a pitch to employees last week (which felt, reasonably convincingly, like we were being wooed to buy a cool urban condo) the revitilization project was called “the first opportunity since the building opened to realize the vision of its original designers.”
My biggest beef with the TBC as it now stands is that the dim, bland and confusing interior design doesn’t mesh with the interesting, glassy exterior. There are plenty of windows on the outside edges of the building, but offices and hallways were built in a ring around the circumference, blocking both natural light and traffic from the interior elevators (here’s the hallway by my desk. Inspiring!)
It’s so confusing that the building originally had wayfinding touch-screen computers by each elevator - put in the name of the person you are looking for, and it’d draw you a map. Then they stopped updating the directory, rendering the screens useless, and they were removed.
(For more of the TBC’s historical background, see the excellent Teamakers article Home sweet deconstructivist home.)
Words and pictures don’t do justice to how lousy the hallowed halls of the CBC actually are. So I created a video of the walk from the elevator to my desk, below. (As far as YouTube goes, it’s astoundingly lame, but gets the point across.)
How *not* to design the interior of an office building. This is the walk from the elevator to my desk at the CBC’s Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto.
The same design principle was, unfortunately, applied to the atrium: it’s 10,000 square feet of natural light, but a ring of walkways and offices cut it off from the interior where most of us work. And that’s why there’s not one place in the building where you can see from the atrium to the outside windows. Instead, you walk the zombie-rific hallways as in the video above.
As Robert Fulford once wrote about the atrium:
The architects aren’t total idiots; they didn’t plan it this way. They designed interior windows, so that many employees who are not important enough to have outside offices would look onto the atrium- a nice second prize. But along the way, when the budget had to be cut, someone pointed out that windows cost more than walls. So most of the windows were eliminated and most of the atrium’s meaning disappeared.
But the new designers - DEGW, who have done this work for the BBC for the past decade - are attempting to fix all that.
The new interior spaces are designed to flow from outside to inside, not in meadering corridors around the circumference and “walled fortresses” within. Areas will be designed specifically for individual workgroups, who’ll even get a little dollhouse kit of pieces to play around with first. There’s an emphasis on “neighbourhoods” and collaborative spaces where you can actually have a conversation with colleagues (right now, you either stand at someone’s cubicle, or attempt to book a boardroom.) There might even be a place to have a coffee or eat lunch.
(Both things used to exist. The TBC had a great cafeteria on the 6th floor, which offered a place to buy or bring lunch and a place to talk to colleagues or guests. They ripped that out to put in offices. And the “coffee stations” around the atrium used to actually have coffee - free coffee, no less, with a grinder! But then someone figured that cost too much, and put an end to it. They were replaced with coin-op machines that dispensed a brew so foul that those machines were also removed. So now 1,000 employees leave the building for 15 minutes, twice daily. Tell me that’s saving money….)
There’s also a concerted effort to redo the ground floor and exterior of the building, to make sure they reflect CBC’s “mission to Canadians” and “contribute to urban culture” - making sure the whole building “is consistent with CBC/Radio-Canada brand.”
As you can see, the ground floor is currently under-utilized. (And those sofas were provided by the design school.)
Speaking of other TBC clients, another change being considered is renting out office space in a vertical block, using a single elevator, instead of the current horizontal sprawl that makes whole floors inaccessible. And they are even considering addressing one of the my greatest complaints: there’s no stair access to the ground floor (except in emergencies.) Such an entrance may be built - hell, they’re redoing all the other ones - but there’s still no uptake on my waterslide idea. Too bad - I bet from the 9th floor you could build up quite a head of steam.
That 9th floor space is, I suspect, part an area that will soon be vacated by the Corp’s exquisite, but doomed, costume department (see Prop chop, Feb. 10.) I’m going to lobby very hard for them to leave some costumes for dress up, but we’ll see.
The good news on that front is that we’ve been told that it’s unlikely that any large numbers of “living human beings” will have to move their workstations to the dismal basement space vacated by the design department. Rumours to that effect had been flying, and I may have helped propogate them - but this was the first time they were ever denied.
So, A+ for presentation and vision. The proof will be in the pudding, but I’m happy to be part of the test batch.
I got burned by a colleague today. I came back from lunch to find this photocopy of a New Yorker cartoon sitting on my desk:
So I glance it over, and I’m immediately surprised to see mention of the CBC. Most American media don’t know we exist, and their reading public certainly don’t.
Then I read the rest - weird smells, raccoons… HEY! That’s stuff I write about!
For a full five seconds, I contemplated the absurd possibility that a cartoonist had chosen my lame blog to typify all lame blogs… and then immediately realized I’d been had. It is, as should be obvious to anyone less vainglorious and feebleminded, a doctored caption. The original read as follows:
“You want my latest opinion about the President? How about my opinion of Japanes enzyme baths. Or breakfast wraps - you need to hear what I have to say about breakfast wraps!”
She matched the font all right, though the missing endquotes should have tipped me off. The best part about it is that, for all my efforts at photoshopping, this gag was done the old fashioned way, with scissors and scotch tape. Can’t beat the classics.
But I will, colleague. I will…..
God bless archivists and librarians.
For all the stereotypes about them, I’ll say this: they hold getting things right as a sacred trust. As a journalist (and a pedant) I appreciate that.
Last week, CBC lost one of the wonderful archivists that toil behind the scenes to keep the broadcaster on air, and keep its millions of tapes for future generations. Andrew DeNew, a media librarian who helped us establish the CBC Digital Archives site, passed away at age 38.
In addition to being an interesting and compassionate human being and a good friend, Andrew was the consumate archivist. He was a collector of of oddities and of history, able to identify almost anything, from the model of a jet aircraft to the flag of an obscure island nation, from a mile’s distance.
Andrew’s memorial was held today. A lot of people miss Andrew dearly, and I feel odd writing about him now - I don’t know how he felt about blogs, and whenever I write about my friends, I try to ask permission first. Lord knows, I wish I could do that here. I wish.
But I also think that Andrew, as a keeper and treasurer of history, would have understood the desire to record it, regardless of format. And I think he’d particularly enjoy the story I want to tell.
Actually, it’s a story he liked to tell.
For the past several years, Andrew worked in CBC Toronto’s visual resources department, which records, catalogues and files the tapes for most of CBC’s national English television programs. It takes a special kind of person to be a media librarian. You can spend days shotlisting news items in boring obscurity, knowing that some of these items will never again see the light of day. Then suddenly there’s a deadline-harried reporter in your face, urgently demanding “that shot of the guy with the beard” - and you’d better know what he’s talking about, and get it in his hands right quick.
Andrew was one of those guys who always knew who the guy with the beard was. And he could shotlist a tape like nobody’s business.
Nobody was more diligent, or paid more attention to detail. He catalogued every scene and camera angle, every make and model of plane, train and automobile, plus what people were wearing and their posture while wearing it. Overkill, perhaps, but as I’ve learned from working on the Digital Archives website, a good item without a good record isn’t much good at all.
But back to the story. Andrew frequently had to catalogue reports from the Middle East, a job he relished because he was - of course - an expert in all things military. His shotlists read like a screenplay. Here’s an excerpt from the record for a stock shot tape from a Michel Cornier piece on Afghanistan (Oct. 15, 2001):
/ms/ 10:04:43 heavily laden donkeys climb up rocky path, several perspectives
/ms/ three soldiers in uniform march out on patrol from mud outpost
/ms/ several soldiers drinking coffee and lounging near frontline SOT
/mcu/ soldier talks into hand radio SOT
/ms/ soldier walks on spine of mountain, see lovely but desolate scenics in bg
(For those who don’t know, “ms” is “mid shot”, “mcu” is “medium close up”, “SOT” is “sound on tape” - see here for more.)
The cardinal rule in record keeping is objectivity and neutrality, and Andrew certainly followed the rules. But this particular tape irked him. The piece focussed on Afghan troops who clearly did not meet Andrew’s standards of military decorum; he loathed unprofessional behaviour, and such behaviour in the military was beyond the pale.
Andrew fought back, slipping some very uncharacteristic editorializing into the record:
“/cu/ bubbling cauldron of vile looking soup”
“/ms/ man holds RPG rocket launcher rather casually next to Tajik comrade with AK-47 assault rifle”
“/ms/ several soldiers in line, one with RPG, commander picks nose then calls them to attention”
He did, too. I pulled the tape; here’s a screen shot:
Finally, Andrew made the conscious decision to inject an entirely subjective plural noun that would become the stuff of (archivist) legend:
“/mcu/ dullards in uniform stand sort of at attention”
Dullards. Dullards! How often do you see that word used in a historical record?
Never, at least at CBC. But Andrew mischeviously slipped it in there, and it remains the only instance of the word in a database containing more than 50 years worth of records.
Funny thing happened, though. In future pieces about the sorry state of the Afghan military, that shot was frequently requested (becoming, literally, the guy with the beard.) And how do you search for that shot among the tens of thousands of shots of the Afghan military?
You search for “dullard”, of course.
Andrew was rather pleased with this. Obviously, injecting unique and arcane terminology does not make for a sustainable cataloguing system, but just this once… why not? How else do you find a needle in a haystack?
I find this lesson rather valuable. I’ve spent the last two weeks working on a very complex, neutral and standardized system for categorizing all the clips on the Digital Archives site that Andrew and I worked on. Taxonomy, they call it.
But we’re also exploring more casual taxonomies, such as tags - systems that make sense to the user. That’s known as folksonomy (how folks classify things.) We probably won’t create a subcategory called “Dullards” - though I can think of a few good candidates - but you can bet people would click on it. And probably find what they were looking for, too.
I’m glad this little gem slipped into the mighty databases of the CBC-TV archives, and I’m glad it’s still there as a memento. Somewhere, Andrew is having a well-earned chuckle, and making a pun about the inevitability of death and taxonomy. We folks appreciate it, Andrew.
![gor[b] icon](http://www.gorbould.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/gorby_icon.jpg)
Just a quick note to point out a new page I’ve added to the site. Over there, on the right (and up a bit, if you come to this late) you’ll see a link called Photoshopping. It’s a collection of the various digital images I’ve mashed together for cheap laughs on previous blog posts. The thumbnail images are linked to the larger image, and the “post” text link will take you to the story that spawned the image.
(I’m aware that Abode doesn’t like photoshop used as a verb, and those who care what they think sometimes call it photochopping. I couldn’t care less, though being something of a nitpicker, I’m generally no fan of turning nouns into verbs, particularly proper nouns. And “photoshopping” does sound like I’m out at Ikea looking for a cheap Ansel Adams print for my kitchen. But chopping is no better, though it does imply more of the coarse butchery evident in my sorry work.)
I really wish I had the skills to do better than this, or the nerve to enter something in Worth1000.com (combining two of my favourite pastimes, check out their Urban Legend contest) or even the Rick Mercer Photo Challenge (I’ve actually mocked something up for them thrice, but shown nobody. I’ll post them if anyone cares.)
Finally, you may have notice that I’ve been burning a little [g] logo into my most recent photoshopped images. This isn’t any sort of copyright protection nonsense - who the heck would want to reuse this crap? I’d be flattered - but merely a way of alerting the incredibly stupid to the fact that this is not a real photo.
But nobody’s that stupid, right?
The latest entry to Commuting by Numbers comes from far from (my) home: the Netherlands! Tse Moana, who I’ve known for many years via the online politics game NationStates, did some counting on a three-hour(ish) train ride from Winsum to Leiden (”north of Netherlands to middle part of Netherlands.”)
So, here’s our first European Cx# entry (see, I’ve even created an almost-indecipherable acronym!) All her selections lend this entry the flavour of the originating country - I think it’s rather wonderful. Thanks Tse.
Commuter: Rianne
Location: The Netherlands
Commuting time: A 3 hour tour
Route: By train from Winsum to Leiden
Bridges & Overpasses: 96
Soccer Goals: 82
Childrens’ Climbing Play Things: 8
(I have no idea what they’re properly called in English) [me: hmmm, try “climber”, “play set” or “jungle gym”]
Cows: 5 (1 ‘proper’ and 4 Scottish Highlanders)
Sheep: about 500 or so, in 25 different flocks and groups
Construction sites: 9
Mills: 2
Wind Mills (the high white ones): 6
Train Stations: 28
Passing Trains: 33
Olympic Trains: 4 (orange painted trains made to transport our olympic athletes)
Buildings with things sticking out: 6 [huh?]
Dolmen: 1 [me: I had to look this one up in wiki]
Horses: 88
People playing golf: 3
Plastic garden chairs tossed away in the woods: 2
Prisons: 1
Military Excercise Grounds: 1
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