My office is in the middle of a hideous corporate park.  Big buildings with no character.  Truck traffic, controlled by boom gates that take a good minute to contemplate if they are going to open for you when you drive up to them. A couple of carefully manicured sections of grass to chill out on for lunch.  Two mega-cafes, whose owners probably can’t believe their luck at scoring a business in a location filled with cashed up corporate types who are trapped in a concrete jungle and have to drive five to ten minutes away to have any other choices for lunch.  All they have to do is stick a couple of olives or feta on a sandwich to appear like they are selling a "gourmet" product.  And worst of all, there is a stupid corporate park newsletter full of typo-ridden crap that litters the concrete every few weeks.  The only shops around are mega marts, storage facilities and home decorator outlets.

So one of the biggest luxuries is finding time to escape from the corporate park for lunch (which rarely happens).  Today we managed to get away to Glebe, and it was so refreshing to inhabit the normal world during the daylight hours.  There is something luxurious about inhabiting the weekday 9 to 5 world that I am now deprived of participating in.  I took lunches in a cafe on a Wednesday, or beers on a Thursday afternoon, for granted during my student days.  Now, being outside the trappings of the corporate park for anything other than a story or photo job between 9 to 5 on weekdays seems like a decadent treat.  We went to Glebe (to Well Connected, one of my favourite cafes in the area), had frappes and pumpkin and olive lavash, and even spent a short time perusing the book shops.  ‘Twas lovely.

It was so strange though.  Even the weather seemed nicer once we left the drab trappings of the corporate park.  Did the architects design them to be sites of misery on purpose?  Our old office, while equally dull inside, was at least in close proximity to shops and normal cafes.  But I guess the less distractions there are, the better we serve the grinding mill of capitalism…