Oh, the irony

[cdybedahl]

Around here, there's a large hospital called Karolinska Sjukhuset. One end of it faces in the direction of my slimy employers' office building. There's a clear, unbroken line of sight between them, over a highway, a railway track and a parking lot. The office building wall facing that way is all glass. Inside are several floors of large, unbroken office areas. They don't even have cubicles, much less walls or doors. A working environment that is, in my opinion, intolerable and quite inhumane. Anyway, this means that from the hospital, you can easily see everything that goes on in the office with nothing more than a pair of binoculars.

Today I noticed that the particular part of the hospital with the nice view of the office is their Suicide Research Center.

Comments

[fifitrix.livejournal.com]

Now, I know that Sweden is supposed to have one of, if not the, highest suicide rates in the world, but after reading your post I find myself wondering whether this is due to the fact that you guys are doing all the research on it and everyone else is just in denial...

Either that or that your architects are designing buildings so stressful as to warrant a suicide centre next door.
Which one was built first I wonder?
Either way I hope you have a desk facing an interior wall or at least in a tolerable position.
Open plan offices can be terrible. I had a colleague who had to be moved as she suffered from vertigo and was placed next to a floor to ceiling outside glass wall on the seventh floor. She said that everytime she tried to sit there the desk loomed up to her face and she found herself falling backwards. What's wrong with bloody brick walls with windows ?

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Now, I know that Sweden is supposed to have one of, if not the, highest suicide rates in the world, but after reading your post I find myself wondering whether this is due to the fact that you guys are doing all the research on it and everyone else is just in denial...

That factoid comes from the early seventies, and has long since been shown to be nothing but a case of the Swedish government being less dishonest about suicide statistics than most (or all). These days, even entirely official statistics have us far below places like the ex-USSR, Japan and Argentina.

And the building the Suicide Research Center is in is oldish, from the 1920s or so. Our office building is all of two years old. I don't know when the SRC moved into their place though.

I haven't actually been to the office for six months now, so sod knows where my desk is right now... It used to be right by the window wall, which I actually mostly liked. The thing that bothered me most about the place was the constant noise. Which wasn't made at all better by the fucking moron of an architect who designed place making all the walls, the ceiling and the floor from hard sound-reflecting materials without a any dampening stuff at all.