Surely you guys remember our old office which we moved out of in early August last year. While it was tough at first for a majority of us to settle into the new digs, it is hard now to imagine working anywhere else, at least for me.

Part One – Sweet Commute

When the choice was made to move to 500 Harrison from our previous digs, in my head it played like this:”We looked at many criteria including Cost, Timing, Flexibility, Availability, Attractiveness of Space and Building, Lease term, Amenities and Employee Impact, BzzAgent Branding….and in the end we chose the place closest to Erik’s house.”

While I was psyched, obviously, others weren’t. My new commute is one of the big reasons I love this office. Rain or snow, I now commute to work biking, it’s not too hard (I’ve only taken a cab 4-5 times this past year when the weather was just too rough).

After a few experiments I got it down to 11 minutes or so. After a few stolen bike, I got an ugly single-speed ride, custom-made from assorted and rusty parts (including a 20 years old Brittish steel frame. It even has a couple of fake repairs done with a bit of putty and clamps.That one, they won’t try to steal:

Update:
Less than 24 hours after writing this blog post and even before Dave published it, I found my bike laying on the street. Someone had attempted to remove its front wheel unsuccessfully and in his/her frustration had bent the wheel making the bike unusable. I had to walk to work. Never underestimate people’s ill will.

Obviously, I know I am lucky and few people have it as good as me here, commute-wise (half a dozen of us live in the South End, I think). Losing one or two hours each day to commuting affects your quality of life heavily, ask my friend Damien who commuted from Rhode Island (across Massachusetts) to New Hampshire every day.

There are quite a few other things I want to talk about working in this new office.
* Sports (Kickball, Soccer and Four-square)
* Biking
* Food options
* Snacks, Musak and Culture
* Of conference rooms, projectors and the Red Sox
* Architecture and layout
* Freedom
* Sue & MS
* Summer Hours

P.S. My commute history, for those who are so bored at work they want to read on:

I lived in Paris when I started working and my commute, using the subway was over an hour, a straight shot from my 20th arrondissement place to my work, west of Paris. I quickly learnt to sleep for exactly that time and my commute became a non-issue.

When I moved to the US, back in January 2000, I went and bought a big and mean SUV (my first car ever, I was 27) to commute from Roslindale (a nice city of Boston burb) to Burlington (MA), a 50 minutes commute or so.

Shortly thereafter, my company, SilverStream, moved to Billerica lengthening my commute to a little over an hour on average. Commuting was becoming painful and took as long as 4 hours in heavy snow. Not fun. After we got bought by Novell, the mothership moved us to Waltham, a slightly better commute with Route 2 being the most pleasant highway stretch I know and virtually without cops.

A year later, I was transfered to another division and office, in Cambridge. The commute eventually became too short to drive and I began biking during the nice days. In late 2005, I took a job at BzzAgent and started taking the T and biked the 30 minutes often. Now, as you know my commute is down to 10 minutes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 12:37 am and is filed under The Central Hive. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.