Square Footage, Part 1

The office used to be in the downtown area of Toronto, near the intersection of Bloor (the major east-west street) and Yonge (the major north-south) streets. From my house, it was a twenty-minute bike ride that went through diverse neighbourhoods: first Chinatown, then the University of Toronto campus and finally, a chi-chi stretch that used to be known as the “Mink Mile” in the ’50’s. While the office building in which we worked was an unremarkable glass-and-steel box, it was located near interesting places. Working late wasn’t so bad because home was close by and it was possible to run all kinds of errands while you were there. When we were close to a deadline, I’d call it a day at 11:30 or midnight and still be able to hop in a cab and meet my friends at a club or bar ten minutes later. It was possible to work start-up hours (hopefull, only near deadlines — most of the time, the hours were sane) and still have a life.

That changed in September. Along with the company’s meltdown came some nastiness from the building management. Before the company was a P2P software development shop, it was an advertising agency. The lease for the office space was under the agency’s name, not the software shop’s name. The building management said that technically, we didn’t have a contract with them; some advertising agency — which was shut down so that the founders could focus on software — did.The company was presented with a new, unaffordable lease. We had no choice but to find new digs.

Given our money woes, I can appreciate the need to find a cheap place, and I knew that might mean moving out of the downtown core. What I can’t understand is why “cheap” had to imply “the most remote, desolate, out-of-the-way, inaccessible-by-real-public-transport, characterless office park hell straight out of Office Space.” Silicon Valley without the benefit of being hyped up. “Cheap” also implied “close to the most of management’s burbclaves.”

The new office is on a street named after the first company to build an office there, off Highway 7, an east-west road north of the Toronto city limits. A good chunk of the area is still open space punctuated by billboards announcing future housing developments, office complexes or outlet malls and warehouse-sized stores. The remainder is filled by — you guessed it — housing developments, office complexes, outlet malls and warehouse-sized stores. They all look identical. The houses, in an attempt to maximize interior square footage, have been built so that they take up as much of their lots as possible, creating the kind of apartment-like crowding that most of the homeowners were trying to escape in the first place. The office buildings are boxes devoid of character, glum IT castles with moats full of Civics, bimbo boxes and asphalt. The area is so dull that my co-worker John’s GPS software can list only three nearby places of interest within a ten kilometre radius, one of which is a franchised theme restaurant.

The one bright spot in this dismal neighbourhood is a bone of contention for the locals: the Chinese community. In the early ’90’s, as the British lease on Hong Kong was running out, there was a mass exodus of Hong Kong Chinese (the HK’s, as they were known) to cities like Vangroovy and Toronto. They followed standard immigrant procedure: if you’re poor, you live in the inner city; if you’re rich, you live in the ‘burbs. As the HKs came in, so did businesses that geared towards them. Chinese restaurants, stores, movie houses and malls. There’s Chinese signage and Hondas everywhere. While this cultural invasion seems to have gotten some people’s dander up, I think it’s the only bit of character in this bland, franchise–heavy desert.

It’s not a nice place to work, and I’m glad as hell I don’t live there.