Padded Walls

As earlier promised, a discussion of the padded walls in our dispatch center.

We work in a windowless basement room. Correction, not totally windowless. What windows we have lead into the mainframe room or the supervisors office. A couple years ago we got a remodeling. Basically, the construction entailed of taking down the old padded walls (that was suspected by we dispatchers to have mold but was never confirmed by the city) and hanging up new padded walls. And adding more complaint taking and radio dispatching equipment to our already full room.

But they are not called padded walls. They are called noise absorbent paneling. In a pretty grey and white concrete pattern so we dispatchers don't start thinking of the padded walls as a viable source to pound our heads against.

Noise absorbent paneling or padded walls. The affect is the same. We spend 10-15 hours a day in a room that is just short of being sterile by the addition of framed color photographs of beautiful landscapes. So not all color is letched from our lives.