Deck the Halls…

…with rugs of horror. While in Tasmania I am working at the Menzies Research Institute. Until this week everyone associated with the MRI was distributed amongst several different centers around Hobart, but the institute has now started to amalgamate in a large, new, and not-quite-complete building. Our group, one of the first to move, arrived on Wednesday. Most of my co-workers had been in the building once or twice before, and everyone warned me (the newbie) about this:

The camera in my iPhone doesn’t do it justice. The walls are a dayglo chartreuse and the carpets look like a multicoloured ECG gone haywire. Furthermore, every group of desks has a cluster of cables that disappears into the ceilings. Resistance is futile.

My desk is perfectly grey and functional, and slightly curious because it shares a wall with the uber secure cancer registry. Therefore I can make faces at the girl who sits across from me (and vice versa) but we cannot have an actual conversation. Rather like being in a fish bowl, I imagine. Note the space-ship-like windows. The whole operation looks like a Borg ship from the outside as well.