The Hitt Hosting suite: floor seven
Floor 7 has ten doors, one for each product in the Hitt Hosting suite, five on each side of a short corridor. This is the fifth post in the series. Engineering on floor 4 has six doors. This floor has the same idea with more products and smaller rooms.
Ten products, ten rooms
One desk for the whole suite would start every answer by working out which product you meant, and it would get there knowing nothing in particular about any one codebase. So each product in the suite gets a room, and the room is the context.
| Side | Front of the corridor | Second | Third | Fourth | Beside the lift |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| West | Hosting | CRM | Desk | Field | Security Suite |
| East | Systems Engineering | Books | HR | Sign | Base and Infra |
Base and Infra is the odd one. Giving the base its own room means that when something belongs underneath a product, there is a door to point at.
The mall behind the building has a Hitt Hosting store with the products boxed on its shelves, each box in its own colours. It carries nine. The tenth room, Base and Infra, has no box on the shelf.
Why the rooms are shallow
Every floor in the building has a corridor of the same length, because the lift has to land in the same place on each. Six rooms fit that length at the normal depth of 15 feet. Ten rooms do not. I could have made the building longer, but then every other floor would have grown a tail of empty corridor to match, so I made the rooms shallower instead. Ten rooms on five ranks fit the same run as six on three.
The suite rooms are about 8.5 feet deep. That changes how they are furnished. A desk set four feet in would have taken most of the room, so the desk sits about three feet in from the rear wall. The product board hangs on the front wall facing the desk. On the corridor wall it would have hung across the doorway.
What each room has is a desk, a single monitor, a shelf with ring binders on it, a few loose papers and a mug. The board carries the product’s name and nothing else. I kept these rooms plainer than the ones on the practice floor, because ten of them share one corridor and a crowded room at that depth is a closet.
Binders are the suite’s shelf style. Compliance on the practice floor and Partnerships on the executive floor keep binders too. The other offices keep books.
What the doors say
The nameplate beside each door has the product’s name, with The Suite underneath, at eye height on the corridor side of the doorway. The same name goes in capitals on the header over the door and on the blade sign that sticks out into the corridor.
The lobby directory and the doors take their names from one function, so a name on the board is always the name on the door. The two disagreed once, and the board called the spare room on engineering Engineering while its door said Spare desk.
The lamp, the question flag and the person at the desk work exactly as they do on engineering, and for the same reason. The lamp is dark when a desk is idle, amber when work is queued and green when a session is working. A flag goes up on the door when a desk has stopped on a question for me. When a session is working, someone sits down at the desk. The browser asks for the state every ten seconds.
If you are not signed in, the screen on each desk shows the product name and the word locked. You can walk into any room, stand in front of the desk and read the board on the front wall. The lamp is the only thing that tells you whether anyone is busy. The doors, the product names and the layout are public, and the work behind them is not.
Who is on the floor
The floor has people on it during office hours, which are 10:00 to 14:00 Eastern, Monday to Friday. The lobby directory says so. In that window five people sit at desks and four walk the corridor. The walkers stop beside doors, standing two and a half feet toward the front of each one so nobody blocks a doorway. They also stop facing the lift doors, and either side of the lift, where the corridor opens out. A visitor in the middle of the day meets a working floor. At nine at night the corridor is empty. I decided that a visitor at that hour should meet an empty office and not a staged one.
The suite has ten rooms, so it has the largest cast of any corridor floor.
Press 7 in the lift. The directory lists the floor as the Hitt Hosting suite, with the ten rooms under it. To see which products have a session running, walk the corridor and look at the lamps.