Once upon a time...
I mean, in 1986, when I first came to the Department of Education, hired as
an assistant on computer related research projects, I was in an office on
the 4th floor. Now, this big ugly 70s building (coated with copper-coloured
aluminium plates) we are in (and where I knew the lower regions very well
from the three years I had just spent there in primary teacher training) is
built in a slope, in sort of a staircase fashion. There is a 4th floor on
only a relatively small part of the building: three "blocks" along ONE
corridor. While on the second floor, where the main entrance is, there are
THREE parallell north-south corridors with FOUR (colourcoded) blocks of
rooms along them. The 4th floor is where the researchers are: how about
that for an ivory tower.
In this tower there was a coffe room. People who worked there pooled money
for coffee, and there was a tin where visitors could drop a few coins for a
cup. Later the department started providing the coffee: there was a period
when it was a Big Issue whether doctoral students attending our courses but
not employed could come there for their breaks!!!
In those years a few of us who came in early had formed a habit to start
the day with coffee and chat: the group with this particular habit talked a
lot of "shop". It was actually a splendid place for an apprentice like me
to learn about good PhD theses and questionable ones, the local history of
the department, how to write APA-style references, how to finish a PhD or
how to get stuck... on a scale from the reflective excavation of general
principles to the rightout gossipy. And, just like here on the xmca people
would talk about their own experiences and anecdotes about their kids,
using some theoretical perspective that was "on the floor".
Then, at lunchtime, a larger and more heterogeneous group of people brought
their lunchboxes//sandwiches to the coffee room. Somehow, the
administrators clustered around the "dining-room table" while us assistants
and doctoral students slumped in the sofas in the corner... where, for that
matter, foreign guests also used to gather. The conversations were
generally very different: House Car Tv & Children versus Husserl Cognition
Theory & Courses. Come to think of it: both very exclusionary, in different
ways -- although what gets commented on there is the Elitism of displaying
theoretical interests, not the Elitism of having House Car and Children
(I've got kids, but not the other stuff, so I notice).
One main event in the history of the coffee room was when the dean of that
time had the idea to bring together the staff on the 3rd floor and the
staff on the 4th floor in one coffee room (they used to have their own,
downstairs). Both floors belonged to the same department, but the merger
between the research depertment and the applied department had taken place
only a couple of years before I came there. Talk about architectural
symbolism: what's higher and what's lower. Naturally the big gym for the
teacher education is on the first floor, which is half subterranean...
Anyway, our dean decided to break down a wall and join the coffe room with
a little used seminar room into One Big Family Coffee Room... Somehow it
never quite worked: the room got too big for comfort. A few years later
(naturally) they had to reinstitute a coffe room on the 3rd floor -- the
staff down there more or less squatted in the corridor end down there with
their coffee machine, anyway. And coincidentally, this was about the time
when the tempo of the department really started to have centrifugal
effects. People work with more different tasks, have less time for sitting
down at regular times, etc. I work in the annexe building now (which is
worth a story of it's own) but my impression is that the only ones that sit
down together for lunch are the secretaries. No setting for research
apprentices anymore...
All this backgrounds completely the fact that we are VERY pampered with
good housing and departmental localities in Sweden. I know. But it doesn't
make the sociospatial characteristics of the coffee room setting less
interesting. Well, I suppose ANY setting could be read in interesting and
revealing fashions...
Eva