by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2005/07/01 17:12 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/07/01/434768.aspx
The discussion about window offices in Mikhail Arkhipov's blog (via Gretchen!) got me thinking about the one time I had a window office.
I had just gotten the contract to write the Internet Assistant for Access 95, my first contract with the Access group. Now that I think about it, the contract was actually with David Lazar and the folks in DAD (Desktop Applications Division) Marketing. There was going to a cool "Publish to the Web" wizard in Access 97 but they wanted to get out a smaller version of it for Access 95. And I happened to be in town (doing a six month contract working for the Certification Systems folks), so they thought this would fill some time nicely....
Anyway, Access was in Building 1 back then (early 1997, I guess?) and there was just nothing available in the way of suitable offices.
I offered to just work from home but nobody had gotten me approved for RAS yet. Plus they just wanted to make sure I could meet with people and talk to them and such.
So they stuck me in a huge window office. No name tag on the door or anything, but it was a place to plug in the computers and get work done.
No one seemed to mind that this was my office either. Which is odd if you think about how the rules about window offices are allocated (see Mikhail's post).
I was there for about three weeks. And then one day....
Someone put up a makeshift name sign that had my name and alias on it. Within half a day of that there were so many complaints about the vendor with the window office that Greta (the group's Admin) had me immediately moved into an office, I think it was the "Access Insider's" office (where they would have external customers who were visiting sit).
I have talked to several full-time MS employees about this a few times in the 7+ years since it happened, and almost without fail people understood why no one might mind with no sign on the door but might object strenuously once there was one -- even a makeshift one that was clearly not official. Now I have been a full time employee myself for almost three years and I still do not get it.
I am on a team with a lot of senior people right now, with probably so many people who will get windows first that I may never see Seattle clouds out the window.
But if no one had put up a sign I might have kept that office for the rest of that year.
Ah well, at least there are the memories of the window office I had for three weeks, once upon a time....
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