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On the Beach

Finally! The study with the terrible hours, the uncooperative client and the AP who refused to manage scope is over! No more Mr. Delivery dinners, no more problem-solving at 10 pm, no more updating the same slide for the 48th time.

Sign on the Beach Room door

It’s beach time! A week or two of sleeping more than five hours a night, going to the gym, popping to the office for some eLearning and admin, and leaving in time to have dinner with friends or make the 8 pm movie.

At least that’s the sunny beach fantasy. The reality can be quite different…

With most consultants out to keep the lights on or eradicate polio, beach workers are a rare and hotly contested commodity. Requests are logged with PD weeks in advance and by the time you wake up on your first beach morning, you will have 14 mails in your inbox: one with an assignment and 13 with Excel files to be consolidated, documents to be proofread or case studies to be synthesised.

Some beach work can be really good fun and give you a sneak preview into new industries and functions. Other requests, however, make you want to pull your hair out. What do you say after a week of editing a 289-page vertical when the partner asks you to add a double space after every full stop? Or when a too-busy-to-talk AP emails “instructions” and you don’t understand a single word or acronym?

Paper on favourite chair to make sure no one else takes it

And obviously everything is always urgent – the LOP needs to be submitted tomorrow, the slides should have been ready yesterday and the analysis has been overdue for a month but no one was available to do it. Lucky you! It’s hard to see how life on the beach differs from life on the average non-banking study.

But do not despair. There is a place at the office where people understand your pain. A place where work and fun are evenly balanced, where watching YouTube videos is as important as researching Know, and where numbers are crunched as much as biscuits: Welcome to The Beach Room.

Message from a colleague after rolling off the beach

Here, colleagues who have never met before, soon become friends. No matter if it’s a one week BA or an EM who is just in the window, there is no better place to get to know people than the beach. After a week on the beach, you will know each other’s coffee tastes, favourite muffins, evening plans and latest dating disasters.

Being on the beach also means that you finally get a chance to meet some of the people who work in the office: the EA Ninja you have been mailing for the past eight weeks but never actually met in person; the R&I guys who saved you from looking like a complete fool on your first day on the study; and Jenny, Love and all the other office angels.

But no matter how tedious the assignment may have been, after a week or two on the beach, you will feel refreshed and healthy, you will have laughed a lot and made some great friends and you will be ready and eager to get back on a study – this time with a fun team, decent hours and a well-managed scope (you hope)!