Evohosting

Moving into the new office

Posted by: Matt R. // // September 6th, 2008 // Company, General

Moving in started early on Monday morning with us all arriving at least half an hour before start time as there were early deliveries which needed signing for and things to move around.

The photo below shows part of our reception area. When we first arrived the office was bare, as we just had stuff from storage such as spare cabling, server parts, random boxes and soon-to-be rolled out servers.

The first arrivals were the some of the computer parts we would be putting together, and our chairs.  First up, chair building!

Strangely enough for the most part the chair building proved challenging due to difficult instructions with 4 poor images telling us what to do. Myself and Toby decided to disregard the instructions and do it our own Jedi way, which kind of worked, eventually. Tim actually followed the instructions (what sort of techie does he think he is???) then spent 20 minutes waiting for us to finish (well he spent 20 minutes smoking outside actually!).

The chairs turned out to be incredibly comfortable, of course – the only reason we got them was that we were told that they were featured in the Base HQ in the (poor) movie Armageddon.

These were quickly coined the uber chairs as they have many buttons and levers to do all sorts of crazy chair-like things. The photo doesn’t do them justice, we’d have to send you one so you can experience the uberness.

We then had the phone call that Tim was dreading. “Sorry, your desks won’t be arriving today!” ARRGH! WTF? Nevertheless, we carried on unavaded.

The remaining computer components arrived very soon after the chairs were completed so we rapidly got stuck into building some PCs. The building for the most part was fairly simple, except I struggled with a few parts given that this was my first build but I was given help when needed. The only part which caused major issues was the ‘Ninja’ heat-sink, which clipped in incredibly awkwardly, even the pro’s of the office spent a fair amount of time fiddling with it and making sure the little metal rods wouldn’t fall onto the motherboard causing much smoke. Once they were all running and installs were completed (Vista setup was so long we had a lunch break in the middle) everything came together perfectly.

With our 22mbit Internet provided by Be* (we’re 150metres from the exchange) all the necessary drivers and software updates were done in lightning fast times, we spent the remainder of the day with our monitors sitting on our computers, the curvy keyboards on our laps and struggling to use the wireless mice on our arm rests. Difficult but comfortable and workable.

We spent half of Tuesday in a  similar predicament but the desks finally arrived in the afternoon and were set up by the people delivering them, which allowed us to concentrate on work future promos and tickets.

Once that was all completed we got together and made a list of things that need addressing.

The rest of the week went very smoothly, well apart from this – which wasn’t too much fun! So finally, after 4 years of crazy 24/7 non-stop working, our little start-up company (with no outside funding, shareholders or general evil) finally has an office in Maidenhead town centre.

Because we’re all in the same location now we can get a lot more done, our ticket responses during office hours should on average be 5 – 15 minutes, we’ll be blogging every day, we’ll be working on new services, a new site and much more.

Thanks to all our customers that have made this possible, we will always go out of our way to stay in contact both when things go wrong and when things are going well – customer satisfaction and uptime are our two main priorities, with no exception. These are the two core principles that have built Evohosting and we’ll stay true to them.

And guess what, my digital camera just ran out of batteries – so I’ll post the rest of the pictures later on!