Another morning in the Landscape Architecture office and as usual I arrive 10 minutes early and set myself up so I’m ready to hit the ground running at 9:00am. This is how I like it, it always get’s my day off to the best start and I think it’s a good habit to adopt. You can’t guarantee success but you can do a million little things to sure your ready for it when it comes. This is just one of those little things.
The day presses on and everybody is setting up, making the morning coffee, opening files, discussing projects, the general commotion that goes on in any office first thing in the morning. Me I’m just sitting at my desk, tapping away, throwing the odd “hello” and “how are you” to people as they go by me. I think it’s important to have communication at the very basic level. It creates a nice atmosphere and builds up greater communication between you and your colleagues.
Everything seems fine until everybody in the office realises that the P: Drive isn’t working, this is essential to every bodies work, this is where all the files for every single project is saved, these are the files we all share and all work on. If this doesn’t work, nobody can actually do anything and the office is down. To top it all off the internet is also down, another detrimental blow to the function of a successful office. However I was the only person in the office who could actually work on their computer, you see I’ve got into the habit of backing up all my work at the end of each day on my USB key, believe me I felt an little smug working on my computer that day, but not for long as you’ll soon find out!
These things happen, they are all part of life, sometimes you just hit a speed bump on the road, it’s a shame, but it happens and we have ways of dealing with it. It wasn’t until 9:36am that something happened that made me realise where the world actually is and how venerable we all actually are. You see at 9:36am “The Power Went Off”. There were no lights, no computers, no office phone line and no work being done. The office was as good as dead; it was shut down, disabled, terminated, kaput.
Chaos followed as people ran around trying to get it fixed, people were lost; all of a sudden we all had two hands we didn’t know what to do with. While all this was going on, I was thinking “interesting” and “how easy would it be to do this to the whole world?” I honestly think if we went 1 month without electricity the population of the world would be slashed by half. We’d go crazy, we’d realise how dependent we’ve become on modern day conveniences and be in complete despair without them.
This is when I also realised that there was one person in the office still working, the one guy who works without a computer, a man with led in his pencil so to speak, he does everything by hand, all the drawings, planning and sketches. I thought to myself “this whole office is resting on him”, our success our survival is all based on the guy who totally ignores all technological advances in design, in Landscape Architecture and in the modern world. The guy who is considered a dying breed is the one guy who will save us from complete failure a man we can all learn a lot from.
You see we all pursue to better ourselves, however many people confuse convenience with improvement and it’s not until 9:36am that you realise just how much you improved as a person, as a professional and as a teacher. It’s moments like this that make you realise how powerless you are, it’s moments like this when you realise what you should really spend your time developing, it’s moments like this that teach us to make the right choice.
So turn of the computer, get out your pencil and draw because you never know when it’s going to be 9:36!
Scott.
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