A typical day at the "office"

Nice one kevin.

Like your new avatar, ? Starting a new support the beeb campaign!

Nice one kevin.

Like your new avatar, ? Starting a new support the beeb campaign!

I thought I would leave a few days before I added a comment.......for reasons that will be clear..!

I am and run an architectural practice in London!

I am in the office between 6.30 and 7.30am. As I am having to be on a train at the moment this is a little less certain than when i usually cycle! I deal with emails and diary until the rest of my team arrive around 9am. I will then be with them on projects, at meetings or dealing with emails and telephone calls on various projects until I leave at 6pm in order to get home to read to my youngest before bed.

I may work in an evening and at weekends but only if i have to. Experience tells me it can usually wait!

I don't have a typical day any longer! Today was taken up with 4 hours of board/management meetings. Tomorrow I am out at meetings all day on existing projects. Wednesday, I will be in the office and then at my daughters school trying to explain maps and plans to her class! Thursday I am out at meetings all of the day mainly to do with new projects hopefully, Friday I am back in the office and in the late afternoon the whole office will have its monthly get together and we all have pizzas and beers to chat about projects and office stuff.

Our projects range from single houses, to small offices, sheds to big mixed use schemes of lots of flats and lots of houses. I no longer design as much as used to but i am constantly involved in what we do. I have always tried to employ people who are much better than me and have been fortunate that many are still with me.

I have been here for 25 years! I wouldn't change much. We have had some really bad years and I have had to make some really unpleasant decisions to make sure we are still here. Is it stressful? Absolutely and i can't say that  I have my worklife balence sorted and nor would Mrs Lutyens sometimes.

I don't think I am any different from my friends who have architectural practices, big or small.

Interestingly what I have come to realise is that I tend to buy more music when i am stressful as if to compensate for my inability to sit down and listen to it at the time! I will have a very happy retirement! In lots of ways!

james

CBR600, personally I play the bugle everytime I land at all! 

But seriously you would probably be surprised about how much we do try to adhere to the schedule.  The reality is that if we end up late for whatever reason it means not only are the pax and crew on that flight inconvenienced but so are any crew/pax who may be flying on the aircraft after us.  The aircraft are in use from 6am to 11pm at night and clearly will be used by two or even three sets of crew in a day.  If a morning flight runs late then it knocks on into the afternoon and evening flights.  

Late arrivals earlier in the day can occasionally have significant repercussions at an airport such as Southampton that closes relatively early and you can find yourself having to divert to Bournemouth which stays open later.  This as you can imagine causes chaos and usually results in the crew ending up in a taxi back to Southampton airport at 1am in the morning and then facing another hour in the car driving home to get back at 2am.  Not nice at all.

To be honest even taking all the above into account I really don't want to be late at all because on an early shift (typically 6am-2.30pm ish) you're usually feeling pretty keen to get home on time after getting up at 4am.

The biggest downside for me of the job is trying to manage enough sleep around the shifts.  It would be fine if you're a bachelor who lives alone but often I find I might have got home at 11.30pm and gone to bed at 12.30pm-1am only to be woken by the family at 7am.  The other issue is that you don't get up or go to bed at the same time every night and the early shifts are exhausting.  Getting up at 4am for work is never fun no matter what your job and I sometimes do it three times a week.

The other big difference is that my days off don't coincide with the rest of the family or friends so it's very easy to just spend your days off on your own playing music or cycling etc but it isn't very sociable. 

I did try to edit my first post to stop it sounding too positive but I have just discovered that you can't edit posts older than 1 hr on the new forum which seems a silly limitation.

Jonathan

I thought I would leave a few days before I added a comment.......for reasons that will be clear..!

I am and run an architectural practice in London!

I am in the office between 6.30 and 7.30am. As I am having to be on a train at the moment this is a little less certain than when i usually cycle! I deal with emails and diary until the rest of my team arrive around 9am. I will then be with them on projects, at meetings or dealing with emails and telephone calls on various projects until I leave at 6pm in order to get home to read to my youngest before bed.

I may work in an evening and at weekends but only if i have to. Experience tells me it can usually wait!

I don't have a typical day any longer! Today was taken up with 4 hours of board/management meetings. Tomorrow I am out at meetings all day on existing projects. Wednesday, I will be in the office and then at my daughters school trying to explain maps and plans to her class! Thursday I am out at meetings all of the day mainly to do with new projects hopefully, Friday I am back in the office and in the late afternoon the whole office will have its monthly get together and we all have pizzas and beers to chat about projects and office stuff.

Our projects range from single houses, to small offices, sheds to big mixed use schemes of lots of flats and lots of houses. I no longer design as much as used to but i am constantly involved in what we do. I have always tried to employ people who are much better than me and have been fortunate that many are still with me.

I have been here for 25 years! I wouldn't change much. We have had some really bad years and I have had to make some really unpleasant decisions to make sure we are still here. Is it stressful? Absolutely and i can't say that  I have my worklife balence sorted and nor would Mrs Lutyens sometimes.

I don't think I am any different from my friends who have architectural practices, big or small.

Interestingly what I have come to realise is that I tend to buy more music when i am stressful as if to compensate for my inability to sit down and listen to it at the time! I will have a very happy retirement! In lots of ways!

james

Thanks for the best wishes folks but the main point of my post was that in spite of actually feeling extremely stressed at the moment my vital signs are now far healthier than when I was working.

Healthy BP and blood sugars were not what I expected. I don't have to see my GP now until end of January.

Don, I hope your daughter is enjoying herself. Being in a small practice is by far the best way to get experience to start with. The jobs are probably smaller and she will see more of the process. All of which will stand her in good stead in the future. Make sure she gets to go on site and see the nitty gritty of putting a building together.

You are also very kind to believe that society should value what we do more but that is a tough one. It would seem that culturally we assume that the world around us should change as little as possible. We seem to want 'old' buildings and are prepared to accept the lowest commen denominator in design in so may walks of life. I remember one of my tutors at college being very depressed that one of his first , and very small buildings, was being knocked down to be replaced in what to him seemed a very short space of time. Of course land is valuable, what is on it rarely!

Paul, no I don't drive a SAAB! Cars are not a perticular interest but i have learnt that it is nicer to drive a car long distances that is comfortable and has a reasonable size engine and have driven a BMW 3 series for a number of years. Not very good in the snow tho'!

You are also right that the recessions, and I have been through a few now, hit the building industry hard. However I am still employed and many are not. The construction industry has been used as a economic regulater for many years. This was particularly so with housing after the second world war and is so now with the lack of investment in infrastructure projects in my veiw. The value of land is similarly used and is similarly damaging. It is unlikely to change tho'!

I have always got up early. My father was a mariner and he is convinced his requirement to get up for watches has rubbed off on me. I think those early hours in summer are the most wonderful. The world is empty but warm and born anew. Just the time to be out on my bike, cycling around country lanes.

And i do enjoy my job hugely. Very rarely is it unpleasant and depressing. I consider myself very very lucky.

james

Don, I hope your daughter is enjoying herself. Being in a small practice is by far the best way to get experience to start with. The jobs are probably smaller and she will see more of the process. All of which will stand her in good stead in the future. Make sure she gets to go on site and see the nitty gritty of putting a building together.

I fear we may highjack the tread but, yes a lot of 'modern' building has faired badly. However it should be remembered that the bad victorian buildings have gone! Those back to back terraces were pretty grim living spaces! For a number of reasons a lot of poorly understood construction methods have been used since WWII. They should not have been misunderstood but maybe the speed of that reconstruction meant that not enough attention was given. Of course there are also cost implications in materials and space as well as the requirement to have much more highly insulated and efficient buildings now. Victorian buildings are rarely either. But yes we still don't get it right as often as we probably should but we are getting there.