Noise

Where I work at the moment is surrounded by construction. We are on the corner of two streets in downtown Vancouver. Construction is taking place on three of the four corners. In our building they are remodelling the ground floor retail space that used to be a bank. On the northwest corner they are slowly flaying an perfectly serviceable mall to replace it with a high-class department store. On the southeast corner they have been building a 40-storey residential tower with ground-floor retail units - a project that started before my first visit to Vancouver in recent times - in November 2003.

Add to that the fact that the air conditioning in our building is less than useful and that it's still beautifully sunny outside so windows need to be opened for cooling, and you get a recipe for noise-induced insanity. One small mercy is that with the additional construction project of the Canada Line along Granville we are now spared the noise of buses going up and down and stopping outside. I kind of miss the clacking of the pantographs, though.