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blogcutterI grew up in the era of the Cold War and the space race. Picture Maxwell Smart with his shoe phone or him ducking down inside a phone booth during the opening credits. Telephones have certainly come a long way since then!
So it was with a certain sense of... I don't know, maybe nostalgia, maybe déja-vu, that I read the following article from the BBC:
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200320-how-firms-move-to-secret-offices-amid-covid-19?xtor=ES-213-
As a born-and-bred Ottawan, I naturally set about trying to figure out where the ghost offices might be in the Ottawa area. I'm a federal retiree but from what I've been hearing of late, many famous government buildings have either been demolished or are in a disastrous state of disrepair and decrepitude. If we're looking at the downtown core, my money would be on somewhere like the Chateau Laurier, which recently drew up its drawbridge and shut its big front doors for what is apparently the first time in its entire history! It's equipped with underground tunnels leading at least to that grand building at Rideau and Elgin which has housed, at various times, a railway station, a government conference centre and now, the Canadian Senate. There may well also be tunnels to the LRT, the NAC and probably a lot of other acronyms and abbreviations I could come up with. Other candidates for these phantom buildings might be the Lester B Pearson Building on Sussex Drive or the old city hall buildings on green island. And what about the old Mint or the old U.S. embassy on Wellington (once projected to be a portrait gallery and now supposedly being made over into some sort of indigenous cultural centre)?
Moving westward in my little Doors Closed Ottawa tour, what about the Canadian Bank Note Company on Richmond Road? And then there are all the high tech office parks of Nepean and Kanata, many of which may have lain fallow since the dot-com bubble burst, although some Defence offices are still in the process of moving out there. Speaking of fallow fields, let's not overlook the lands around and opposite the Nepean Sportsplex, including the test track for autonomous vehicles and the new movie studios. Further west again, there's Dwyer Hill, home of the secretive JTF2 - you know, the one that pretty much hounded poor Mr. Mayhew out of his victory garden, probably because they figured he was casing the Joint? JTF2 were originally supposed to be moving along themselves but last I heard (all this from official media releases, so I'm not divulging any classified information here), they had decided to sit tight.
The new DND campus in Outer Kanata has been regularly described as a "relatively remote location" and presumably that's what conscientious spies want - about half of them, anyway. A remote location where they can use whatever means of communication they have at their disposal (doubtful if cell phones or even shoe phones would work there) where they peer or tune into what's going on somewhere, over the North Pole, waaaay up high... and then report it to their bosses. The other half of the spies want to hide in plain sight, gaining the trust of those they associate with, just before they stab them in the back - or even the front.
How will all that play out in a world of social isolation and social and physical distancing? That remains to be seen, or may remain unseen.
Maybe greeting card salesmen will be declared essential service workers. And maybe we will all rediscover the lost art of letter writing.
So it was with a certain sense of... I don't know, maybe nostalgia, maybe déja-vu, that I read the following article from the BBC:
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200320-how-firms-move-to-secret-offices-amid-covid-19?xtor=ES-213-
As a born-and-bred Ottawan, I naturally set about trying to figure out where the ghost offices might be in the Ottawa area. I'm a federal retiree but from what I've been hearing of late, many famous government buildings have either been demolished or are in a disastrous state of disrepair and decrepitude. If we're looking at the downtown core, my money would be on somewhere like the Chateau Laurier, which recently drew up its drawbridge and shut its big front doors for what is apparently the first time in its entire history! It's equipped with underground tunnels leading at least to that grand building at Rideau and Elgin which has housed, at various times, a railway station, a government conference centre and now, the Canadian Senate. There may well also be tunnels to the LRT, the NAC and probably a lot of other acronyms and abbreviations I could come up with. Other candidates for these phantom buildings might be the Lester B Pearson Building on Sussex Drive or the old city hall buildings on green island. And what about the old Mint or the old U.S. embassy on Wellington (once projected to be a portrait gallery and now supposedly being made over into some sort of indigenous cultural centre)?
Moving westward in my little Doors Closed Ottawa tour, what about the Canadian Bank Note Company on Richmond Road? And then there are all the high tech office parks of Nepean and Kanata, many of which may have lain fallow since the dot-com bubble burst, although some Defence offices are still in the process of moving out there. Speaking of fallow fields, let's not overlook the lands around and opposite the Nepean Sportsplex, including the test track for autonomous vehicles and the new movie studios. Further west again, there's Dwyer Hill, home of the secretive JTF2 - you know, the one that pretty much hounded poor Mr. Mayhew out of his victory garden, probably because they figured he was casing the Joint? JTF2 were originally supposed to be moving along themselves but last I heard (all this from official media releases, so I'm not divulging any classified information here), they had decided to sit tight.
The new DND campus in Outer Kanata has been regularly described as a "relatively remote location" and presumably that's what conscientious spies want - about half of them, anyway. A remote location where they can use whatever means of communication they have at their disposal (doubtful if cell phones or even shoe phones would work there) where they peer or tune into what's going on somewhere, over the North Pole, waaaay up high... and then report it to their bosses. The other half of the spies want to hide in plain sight, gaining the trust of those they associate with, just before they stab them in the back - or even the front.
How will all that play out in a world of social isolation and social and physical distancing? That remains to be seen, or may remain unseen.
Maybe greeting card salesmen will be declared essential service workers. And maybe we will all rediscover the lost art of letter writing.
