Working in the zoo ...

So, the last few days I had to escape my nice well-lit (but slightly crowded) postdoc office at work. The reason? Construction going outside, coupled with the sun (in Liverpool, imagine!) heating up our office. This effectively prevents the opening of any window, as there are either excavators, jack hammers, or other things going off outside or the very obnoxious yelling of the construction workers themselves. I suspect the latter can't be fixed by opening the window and telling them to shut the hell up.

Anyway, as I like my workspace to be relatively quiet, the only solution seems to be to take my laptop and move down to the zoo. Thanks to ssh and X-forwarding this is almost like working on my desktop upstairs, just quieter.

But the zoo?

That's what they call the graduate student office at my new workplace, there are maybe 20 desks in one single room with partitions; a classic large office I suppose. Rumors have it that the name appeared years ago when the partitions were much higher and the single offices looked much more like cages ...