shiny happy crunchy building

I've had plenty of office moves over the years including every form of floor repacking, and experienced many of the ergonomic trends to get more people into the available space.

Yes, I've had those boinging seats, the relaxation swing area, the beach scene, the special hoteling pedestals and even the electric height-adjustable desking favoured by certain Scandinavian countries.

I've also probably been in more temporary offices than proper permanent ones, as a by-product of corporate lifestyle where whatever office space is found isn't quite enough and then another building nearby has to be leased for the over-spill.

I'm finding a current situation slightly amusing, where the building I was in yesterday was built as overspill for another building nearby. In order to do it, the previous building on the space had to be demolished. The construction crews brought in every form of Tonka Toy imaginable and that included a Rock Monster building eater.

Simply put, you could point the big yellow machine at a building and it would somehow ingest it whole and spit out rock pebbles at the back. Before the current building was constructed, we'd look out of the windows of the one nearby and watch the Rock Monster at work. It's not every day you see a whole headquarters building gobbled to dust.

Or is it?

I was in the shiny-shiny replacement building this week and when I looked out of the window I could see the old building. When I say old, it was late 20th Century.

Guess what?

The bright yellow Extec C12+ was at work crunching its way through that very building. I could marvel at the 350-hp Caterpillar C-9 industrial diesel engine and the large vibrating feeder with grizzly and separate discharge conveyor for fine rock. Now I was in the new building watching my old vantage point destroyed before a new even shinier building would take form.

And the overspill of people from the current building? They are over the road in yet another temporary building.

Time for that Queen song maybe?

"And another one, and another one, and another one bites the dust."