Rural Office Park

A Working Environment of the Fortunate

Since January, my employer has had the good fortune of renting an old manor house on a farm in Cape Town's Southern Suburbs. This means that our entire staff compliment gets to work in a quiet and pristine environment while the resident farm workers go about their daily duties. 

For me, this office environment is the ultimate and is definitely the highlight of my working career. Living close by, I no longer use my car for daily commute unless absolutely necessary. This means I can either walk or run to and from the office, following a myriad of routes through the surrounding neighbourhoods, forests and greenbelts.

Apart from the obvious physical and cost-saving benefits, an important spinoff has been the chance to arrive at work in a totally relaxed manner. Similarly, the end-of-the-day commute home is something I genuinely look forward to with anticipation. A half-hour walk through the suburbs carrying my lunch in a small backpack, my average morning journey involves greeting morning walkers, observing the various building alterations and greeting our resident herd of cows about to be let out to their pasture.

My evening run home includes a deliberately longer round-trip: starting out of the back end of the farm, I cut through the more southerly neighbourhoods and up into the municipal forests, before heading home through a greenbelt or two.

I can't say I know of too many people who have the privilege of answering customer queries whilst having a herd of cows grazing just metres from their office window. Or the sound of seagulls straying from their beach climes into our neighbouring wetland during production meetings.

The nature of our business requires quite an intense and concentrated workload, as well as constant deadlines. This adaptation of working environment has definitely made a difference to my productivity. Granted there are still less than inspiring days work-wise, but it's never something that a walk around the nearby vlei can't fix.

What is ironic is that this farm borders on to one of Cape Town's busiest freeways. One look at the M3 some mornings reveals traffic backed up as far as Tokai; people starting their daily trip to the city centre to earn their daily bread. Exhaust fumes, errant mini-bus taxis and road-rage.

I really feel sorry for the township dwellers who commute every day to their various places of employment. Our maid here at work, Cynthia, endures three different forms of transport - bus, 2 separate trains, taxi - from her home in Langa. A born entrepreneur, she makes food for several staff members, sells homemade cakes on the side and is an up-and-coming caterer. Any cooking materials and "hand-me-downs" that she receives are carried home on her daily commute, rain or shine.

The farm workers here tend to variety of daily tasks. Because the land owners also operate a successful concrete business, there are often several masonry projects on the go. They are currently busy constructing a perimeter wall together with supporting fencing, all done in-house. In-between other duties such as herding, garden-tending, maintaining the few dozen bee hives and general up keep of the greater property, a few of these guys do private odd-jobs on the weekends. Two of them recently painted a friend of mine's house over a couple of Saturdays.

There are quite a few clusters of bee-hives scattered all over the property; a colleague actually got stung the other day. I suspect that these hives may be owned by the friend of friend, of which bee-keeping and honey production is his sole livelihood. This guy has hundreds of bee-hives scattered throughout the Western Cape, with some even on his own property. His family home is an original farmhouse lying below the Lakeside mountains; they have an official birth-right to a natural water spring below one the overlooking caves.

These caves are incidentally right above one of my previous places of work. I spent three years as an employee of the SANDF, more specifically for the Navy's Hydrographic Office in Silvermine. The office itself is part of the larger military base, which is perched on the foot slopes of Ou Kaapse Weg. With a panoramic view of the entire northern half of the Cape Peninsula, Cape Flats and beyond, it was certainly one of the more avant garde places to work. That specific area definitely has its own micro-climate, which is extreme to say the least. Back in the "old" South Africa, it would have been unthinkable to take photos of any military installation; "No Photographing" signs were aplenty all over the Cape Peninsula. Fast forward to 2013 and my handiwork is on view below.

It is amazing how that whole area has developed over the past decade. Once a secluded and obscure back-country expanse of greater Cape Town, the Westlake area is now a virtually self-sustaining town. The farms and open land around Pollsmoor Prison are now home to the following:
 

• Pollsmoor Prison
• a technical college
• four office parks
• three exclusive housing estates 
• one private school 
• another golf course 
• a shopping centre
• a foreign embassy (read: fortress)
• smooth, double lane roads
• traffic lights (read: robots for us South Africans)
• two traffic circles
• diminishing pine forest
• gridlock traffic

Compare the above description (circa 2013) with one only fifteen years prior:

• Pollsmoor Prison
• a technical college 
• sprawling Port Jackson forest
• two dairy farms
• several smallholdings
• a few farm houses
• single lane bumpy roads
• two stop streets
• dense pine forest

Yet for all this development, this area does manage to retain a distinctly semi-rural feel. I can remember back in the early 1990s doing organised albeit illegal cycling time-trials up and down the nearby M3 highway early on weekend mornings. That would be unthinkable today, considering the volume of traffic. Even if you cycle over Ou Kaapse Weg at 5am, there are cars passing you every 15 seconds in both directions. Life is just getting faster and more crowded I suppose.

Whilst working at the Hydrographic Office, it was always a mission to turn right onto Ou Kaapse Weg at home time. I can't even imagine doing that now; it may take at least 20 minutes to get onto the road. What with Chapman's Peak being a toll route and the Main Road having a five-year make over (read: constant road works), Ou Kaapse Weg is now effectively an extension of the M3 freeway.

The view from my office window is both beautiful and functional. Functional in the sense that I can judge the daily weather patterns whilst crunching the keyboard. For those locals, the above image represents a morning fog bank lifting over the nearby False Bay. I often compare my early morning view to the local "weather bible," Windguru and the Surfer's Corner photo blog. Late afternoon calls for a weather consensus dictating which way I will run home - all wind, weather and mood dependent of course.