Wouldn't have written this. But a comment from a friend after checking out the steel and glass corporate edifice that another friend works in has got me going.
It has reminded me (due to the lack of work. Otherwise am not one to hanker after materialistic pleasures) that I have always wanted to work in a swanky office. At least for a while. Till I get matter-of-fact about full-length bathroom mirrors and ACTUALLY clean water dispensers.
The closest I came to working in one was with a Chennai based dotcom's branch in Bombay. I was a freelancer for their filmi website and would walk into that office only to key in copy, send mails (and chat on the net), chat up hunky young men, etc. It was another battered building in Fort from the outside but inside they had managed to turn it quite swanky and colourful. Perhaps it had to do with the top boss being a woman :)
Having come to that place from a dying magazine in another crumbling
Fort building with a rickety lift and a newspaper* that functioned out of a bunch of barely held together cubicles with a smelly common loo, I thought the dotcom place was the coolest yet.
Then one day, after a late night Sterling movie, a couple of us went
with a friend to his office nearby, while he picked up the keys to his car to drive us home. It was the end of innocence.
This was a bank. Foreign one obviously, in one of those heritage-type
Fort buildings. Inside, it was a haven of plushness, cleanliness,
comfort, etc, etc. Two of us, the girls in the gang, had to check out
the loo. It was ideal. (Refer to loo demands in appraisal blog ha ha)
The 'workstations' as S, our banker pal called them, were clean, with
ergonomical chairs that didn't have broken legs and didn't plummet down when you wanted to adjust the height.
That was the first. From then on, I have been subjected to a sense of
despair every time some friend talked about her office cafe getting a
makeover (again Fort, again bank) and making it to Inside Outside. It
was of course, bright, cheerful and functional. With clean cups and nice looking coffee machine.
Yet another one started going to his office half an hour earlier to
workout at the gym. By this time I was in Delhi and worked in a duplex flat that would've been nice had 49 people not been crammed into it with strange partitions put up between 'departments'. It boasted of a pantry operated by a man who was addicted to dust, and as we later discovered, fungus on pots and pans. The only bright side was a patch of lawn outside, which was the smokers' and coffee-addicts' corner.
Now I spend my days in a windowless semi cubicle with the most
uncomfortable chairs, overflowing drawers and a dustbin that requires a thorough washing up with the strongest disinfectant available. For recreation and contact with the outside world we have a couple of porthole-type windows near the smokers' staircase and three telephones on our desks, one of them with STD.
The husband works in an ultra modern, glass n steel structure, with
state of the art private lifts, 'workstations', headsets for hands free communication and Italian coffee machine (Yes. The coffee machine is an obsession with me. Period). There's a gym on the terrace, with a swimming pool and a view of the Gurgaon skyline (I'm sure you can see nothing but buildings but I ALWAYS want what I can't have). The cafe has juice, organic bread, five types of yoghurt and five-star catered lunch.
The man of course is totally blasé about the place and says most people he knows work in similar kind of offices. By an act of coincidence most people in such offices ALWAYS work a five-day-week!
Naturelment, any conversation regarding workplaces and workstations at home is PURE TORTURE. Sigh...

PS: For all its lack of amenities, I LOVED the newspaper that functioned
out of barely held together cubicles, including the conference room on
the stairs.