We used to be here.
Sure, it has been over a decade since we were in this zone but the fact doesn't change that, yes, this was our old address and that we used to be here.
No fancy neighhorhood it was when we shifted to this place.
No fancy neighborhood it still is. ;)
But better it is now than it used to be.
Industrial estates are never considered fancy until they are made up to be. #Blk71
And I know this well because we faced a deluge of questions from literally everybody when we made the (unusual) decision to shift the facility from the outskirts of town to this place in Bukit Merah.
People didn't understand why a "creative" company as ours would forgo a hipster shophouse space in a heritage 'hood aplomb with like-minded creatives, drinking spots, coffee houses and restaurants for a raw, rough, clanky, 'old', aesthetically unpleasant space as this in the Singapore heartland.
Of course, they didn't understand our industry either.
We are not an industry whose personnel carry around sexy laptops to work at Starbucks or coffee cafes. Most of our crew don't even use sexy laptops at work because they're just not built for the kind of heavy duty work that we do. I know- I still have a unit or two from those days and trust me, those toys are not lightweight ones that you can throw into a canvas tote bag. And we had at least twenty-five, if not thirty, of them.
We are also not an industry that prides itself on the image of parquet floors, shutter windows and heritage tales. There is no way you can have a parquet floor when you're planning for motion capture, when you're looking to hang blue and green cloths all over the walls of the space and when you're aiming to have performance actors in suits and balls (they used balls then) thump and scramble all around.
This industry we are in works on a canvas.
A raw, rough, empty, plain as s*** canvas.
It was like that then.
It is still like this now.
That being said, revisiting the old office address brought to my face a bit of a pensive smile.
For after all, this was the place where the company shifted business directions and made pivots at a pace like it had never done before. If before this the company rented a tiny little unit in a shopping centre for the sole sake of educational purposes and administrative purposes, here the company moved in for the sole sake of adding production purposes to its cap- and which the company did.
It was here that the studio was launched.
It was here that the studio took shape.
And it was here that part of the studio decided to take a break.
Much has changed both professionally and personally for her staff in the intervening years since the company was here, but like timelessness in these parts, some things remain the same.
The corridors remain the same.
The doors remain the same.
The lifts remain the same.
Even the toilets also remain the same. (To this day the female toilet has no shower unit, but hey ho, it is in the male's! #genderbias)
On the ground floor, the spot of the vending machine also remains the same. Same vending machine still stands near the lifts, readily supplied with bottled and canned drinks from the drinks supplier who conveniently has their office and warehouse unit upstairs.
I took the cargo lift up- for the sake of memories- and for the sake of wanting more space.
I stood outside the doors of the unit that we used to rent (it is available for rent, wow).
I (rudely) hung outside the locked doors of the toy supplier company who has since shifted to an adjoining unit, but whom used to be our next door neighbor and whose elderly staff I once gave plates of food from the buffet spread because we had too much.
Standing outside the doors of our old unit, I thought of the days that we were here. It isn't so much the work that sticks in the mind (plenty of documentation for that) but it is the subliminal elements of office culture that I fondly remember.
Like the sound of KTM trains in the morning chugging away on tracks situated not more than 50 meters away.
Like the salad bowls I kept in the office chill fridge and which I occasionally had for lunch when I didn't feel like heading opposite to the ABC Market or down the road to Anchorpoint or even to IKEA.
Like the afternoon meetings we had with the colleagues in the big open space.
Like the KFC delivery dinners we had on those evenings when we were in the office and didn't feel like going anywhere. (No GRAB or Foodpanda then)
Not all memories are pleasant, of course.
I haven't forgotten the minor skirmishes that took place, I haven't forgotten the startling situations that took place amongst Management, and neither have I forgotten how it was when we fired off underperforming (expat) staff who, for some reason, held an MBA from a middling university but decided they were overqualified for the role despite them not being able to find a job in Singapore elsewhere.
But in life we choose what we wish to retain, and so it was that as I sat on the concrete steps of the open air staircase at the back (where everyone goes to smoke, by the way), staring at the former railway tracks now turned Green Corridor, I realized how far it was the company had come, how long (really!) it had taken for the company to come to this stage, and I wondered privately to myself where the company was going to go from here.