At the office

Today I’m spending a few hours “at the office”.

There are a lot of places in Utrecht where you can go, jack your laptop into a socket, order a cup of tea (or coffee, for those so inclined) and start working.

This is my first time at a place like this and so far I’m very happy with the experience. It’s good to be out of the house for a bit (even cycling through the somewhat-cold was nice). There are people around, so I feel like I’m being social (even though I’m not really talking to any of them that much yet). The tea and carrot-nut-cake are good (and the lunch looks amazing, got to try that next time!).

The major benefit of course is being in an “office-like” setting. There are people at work on laptops all around and a few people are having a (relatively) quiet discussion. I’ve been typing away for two hours now. Normally my attention would have drifted to the end of the world (and not back) by now. And “just one game on the computer” or “one episode of random series X” would have been pushing its way into my frontal lobes.

Here however I would feel very much out of place if I did something like that. Everybody else seems to be busy and productive, so should I!

Of course there still is some distraction. Checking mail a little bit too often, a quick jump towards a news site, getting lost in Wikipedia for a few not-so-relevant pages (there is just a single step between “sums of uniform random variables” (definitely work related) and “German tanks” (not entirely work related…)!).

So for the price of two cups of tea and a piece of cake I get a nice office to use. I think I’ll be hanging out (I mean: working!) here more often!

Maybe next time I’ll wear a suit…