I completely agree with your philosophy! Being a former DEC “mill rat” myself I have fond memories of that complex. The very long walks to obscure conference rooms while conversing with co-workers solved many problems and resulted in shorter meetings. I’ve never since worked in a location with such large and bright lab spaces, afforded by the plentiful square footage of the complex. I too had to compensate for the wavy creaky sloped floors. I particularly enjoyed the stealthily nerdy system in place for using the catwalk system to navigate between buildings. Each side of a catwalk had a series of colored stripes that indicated what floors could be accessed and what building you were heading to. Each stripe represented the corresponding number from the resistor color code. Another simple convention was that everyone’s cube and every lab’s location was specified by a series of numbers: building number, floor, and pole. The grid of timbers holding the building up were each numbers giving accuracy to within about 10ft. That place was by and for engineers!
And if you could find it, the Mill had a great library in it.
And a river running through it. I remember one time, as the lunch time crowds poured out to the local restaurants, a couple of guys canoeing on the river, in a shallow stretch right next to the building getting stuck on the rocks. They looked like a zoo attraction as folks walking by stopped to look on.
I’ll take all of that over the shiny buildings any day.
Fishing from the roof, the empty area scavenger hunts…
I completely agree with your philosophy! Being a former DEC “mill rat” myself I have fond memories of that complex. The very long walks to obscure conference rooms while conversing with co-workers solved many problems and resulted in shorter meetings. I’ve never since worked in a location with such large and bright lab spaces, afforded by the plentiful square footage of the complex. I too had to compensate for the wavy creaky sloped floors. I particularly enjoyed the stealthily nerdy system in place for using the catwalk system to navigate between buildings. Each side of a catwalk had a series of colored stripes that indicated what floors could be accessed and what building you were heading to. Each stripe represented the corresponding number from the resistor color code. Another simple convention was that everyone’s cube and every lab’s location was specified by a series of numbers: building number, floor, and pole. The grid of timbers holding the building up were each numbers giving accuracy to within about 10ft. That place was by and for engineers!
Those are hilarious stories! I've had a number of crappy jobs but have never worked anywhere as picturesque as you have.
This post (and subsequent comments) made my day!
And if you could find it, the Mill had a great library in it.
And a river running through it. I remember one time, as the lunch time crowds poured out to the local restaurants, a couple of guys canoeing on the river, in a shallow stretch right next to the building getting stuck on the rocks. They looked like a zoo attraction as folks walking by stopped to look on.
I’ll take all of that over the shiny buildings any day.