Document Filename: GSCHIS-A002.html

Quentin Bristow, A brief history of space (with apologies to Stephen Hawking) Memorandum, unpublished, January 21, 2002, 10p.

Quentin Bristow is a 1957 graduate of University College London in physics and mathematics and was awarded a PhD in electrical engineering by Carleton University in 1990. He immigrated to Canada in 1957 and joined the Geological Survey of Canada in 1970, after scientific work of various kinds with the Canadian Hydrographic Service, the Department of National Defense, and Atomic Energy of Canada, Ltd. At GSC, he was involved in the research and development of instrumental techniques for the measurement of mercury in soil gases, temperature gradients and electrical parameters in boreholes, and for the measurement of natural radioactivity in laboratory samples and airborne applications. He was the 1989 recipient of the medal for engineering excellence awarded by the Professional Engineers of Ontario. He retired in 1995.

From 1974-1978 he was appointed ‘Space Czar’ by the Director of the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) and tasked with solving the problem of lack of space for offices and laboratories for a growing GSC. In the 2002 memorandum below, he described those difficult times to a new committee assigned a similar task many years later. He worked from memory supported by his files.


To: Gail Brunet, Simon Hanmer, Andy Rencz.

From: Quentin Bristow qbristow@cyberus.ca Tel: 731-9248

21st January 2002

A Brief History of Space
(with apologies to Stephen Hawking)

The meeting with the Emeriti (January 11th), was very much a déjà-vu affair for me, and afterwards I went and dug out the three-volume file that has been gathering dust in my office for many years and which contains the records of the last attempt to deal with the GSC space problem. I took them home and have spent the last week revisiting the gory and frustrating details of that project, which ran from 1974 to 1978, with echoes which seem to have been reverberating ever since.

At first I thought I would just hand you the files and let you rifle through them for anything of possible interest or relevance, but I realised that you wouldn't have the time for that sort of thing. As I went through the history I began to think that it might be worthwhile to distil some of the more pertinent correspondence and make up a package documenting what happened and why. I have now done that and what follows will I hope have some bearing on the project you are currently managing. The relevance is the fact that the project was an earlier attempt to do what you are now charged with doing - finding more space for the GSC at 601 Booth Street, without having to farm units around the city unless absolutely necessary. The circumstances and the options available will be quite different I am sure, but I'll bet that the problems in trying to sugar-coat things for the potential movees, and the bureaucratic inertia involved in actually getting anything done, will be pretty much the same.

Obviously you won't have the time (or the inclination I imagine), to sit down and read this opus from cover to cover. But leafing through it will give you a pretty good idea of what the pitfalls were and where and why things got off the rails from time to time.

Government expansions and contractions are remarkably similar to the Big Bang theory. There is a Big Bang in hiring to respond to some crisis or other, followed by a Big Crunch some years later in response to a perceived need to cut the cost of government. The most recent episodes were the Big Bang of 1974/5, following the energy crisis, and the Big Crunch of 1995, when massive downsizing was the order of the day. I gather that now we are in the midst of another Big Bang.

The space project in which I was very much involved started as I said in 1974. The energy crisis had a lot to do with the hiring binge which created the space deficit. It included recruiting uranium geologists and geochemists to staff new programmes, aimed at identifying favourable areas for uranium exploration and establishing a national inventory of known deposits. In September of that year it was estimated that there would be a shortfall of 11,000 square feet of space by the end of 1975. Clearly something had to be done.

In November 1974 I was appointed Space Czar by Digby McLaren, then the Director of the GSC., and was given the responsibility of solving the problem and the authority to deal with anyone and everyone to get the job done. Digby McLaren was a Cambridge educated palaeontologist who had spent a good part of his career setting up the Institute of Sedimentary and Petroleum Geology in Calgary. He was appointed as the Director of the Survey in about 1971. He was quite an awesome figure with a crisp baritone and a BBC accent and didn't suffer fools gladly - or at all, actually. Whenever I was called to his office, I was reminded of being summoned to the Headmaster's study at my British Public School.

The Deputy Director was a Hard Rock geologist named John Wheeler. Digby said that he had more of the Cordilleran geology in his head than any man living. Reporting to them were the Division Chiefs. They have long since been harmonised with the rest of the Public Service and renamed to Directors. We all rather liked Division Chief, it had a nice ring to it, and you knew instinctively what all the rest of the people were - Division Indians, all of which implied a fiercely independent esprit de corps which set us apart from anything remotely bureaucratic. The colourless Director by contrast is totally inappropriate for the average government manager, because they are never in a position to direct anything, all they can do is simply to follow the rules and make the best of the constraints.

At that time the divisions were as follows:

Regional and Economic Geology (REG)
The Division Chief was John Reesor, a rather austere individual, who always reminded me a bit of Neville Chamberlain for some reason. In fact he was a very distinguished veteran of World War II. His deputy was Ira Stevenson, a very hardworking and conscientious man and easy to deal with. This division was really the centre of the GSC universe and included the Palaeontology and Precambrian Geology subdivisions among others. All other disciplines, such as Geochemistry, Geophysics, Quaternary Geology and so on, were considered as being subordinate to hard rock geology, which was very definitely the core activity of the GSC, or so it appeared to me at least.

Geological Information Processing (GIP)
The Division Chief was Peter Harker, another Cambridge man and a contemporary there of Digby McLaren. His division included the library and the cartographic units of which I think there were three at that time, and the publications unit where research reports were edited and prepared for printing. The cartographers were draftsmen who created the geological maps from the sketches and notes of the geologists. They were a crucial asset, because their output was really the main output of the organisation, (the other one was in the form of geological reports and memoirs). A lot of time and effort was therefore spent in keeping them happy.

Their days were numbered however, because at about that time plans were afoot to introduce computer automated cartography, based on a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-10 mainframe computer. This and its associated equipment would need a complete air-conditioned wing, something which had to be catered for as part of the overall plan.

Resource Geophysics and Geochemistry (RGG)
The Division Chief was Arthur Darnley, yet another Cambridge man, but ten years younger than the other two and the most recently appointed Division Chief. It included the Geochemistry subdivision and others having to do with geophysics: Magnetics, Radiation Methods, Electrical Methods, and a Seismic Methods group. It was in this division that I worked.

Terrain Sciences (TS)
The Division Chief was John Scott. The division included among other groups, Sedimentology, Quaternary geology, Coastal and Marine geoscience and Environmental geology. His deputy was Bruce Craig, an amiable individual nearing retirement with whom I dealt extensively.

Central Laboratories and Administrative Services (CLAS)
The Division Chief was John Maxwell, an analytical chemist, turned administrator. This division was to some extent a collection of groups that did not fit well into the other divisions. It included a machine shop on the ground floor (still there last time I checked) and Maxwell's former analytical chemistry labs and staff. By that time the Geochemistry group in RGG had setup its own chemistry labs specialising in the analysis of lake and stream sediments and had all but eclipsed the other group. The GSC central administration also reported to him, which included the Personnel office, the Administrative Officers (A/Os), assigned to the divisions and the typing pool

Background
In what follows the numbers in brackets refer to page numbers in the plethora of memoranda which is of course the only written record that survives in projects of this kind. In a couple of cases there are A and B suffixes to numbers, where I added some more stuff after the numbering was done. [In this CD/HTML version the original occasionally haphazard pagination has been retained - to keep the chaos-genie in the bottle frankly! The references are now clickable links in the form "document number - number of pages in it", e.g. (Doc 71-3) A chronological summary of the various documents is also on this CD as an MS-Word file: GSCHIS-A002doclist.pdf - Q.B. December 2006]

Before the great shuffle, the physical layout was reasonably well suited to the divisional structure. Most of the biggest division (REG), was consolidated on the fourth floor. The Palaeontology subdivision of REG was on the sixth floor, with some laboratory facilities in the north wing, and its precious collections of fossils housed in the east wing (which juts out toward Lebreton St. at the rear of the building).

The GIP division had the library (still on the third floor), and I believe, a cartographic unit in the north wing of the fourth floor (with windows looking down Booth St. to Carling Ave.). One of the other two cartographic units was on the third floor east wing open plan area, (room 390) and the other was already at City Centre, having been moved there not long before. The publications unit was I seem to remember on the second floor east wing. These were still the days of electric typewriters and cutting and pasting figures and diagrams into pages of text, so the regular production of Current Research was a full time operation involving a lot of people.

The TS division was more or less consolidated on the third floor, with the RGG division on the fifth and seventh floors. CLAS had labs also on the seventh floor, with the GSC Administration of course on the second floor (the business class floor). There were reproduction facilities (photo mechanical and a photocopying machine), and a photographic section, also on the fifth floor.

By the time I was appointed or anointed as space Czar, reporting to John Maxwell (Doc 1), we had been given the second floor of the old National Captial Commission (NCC) building, now known as 401 Lebreton St., but then known as 299 Carling Ave. Most of the correspondence refers to it as that address. We had also been given some space at City Centre, a rather depressing C class building in the hinterlands off Somerset St. West. We were also negotiating for space in the newly built Tower (580 Booth St).

My conundrum in a nut shell was to find a way to persuade (entice, bribe) people to move out of 601 and into this new space, and to do so in such a way that there would be the minimum of disruption of the divisional structures and lines of communication and supervision. The first order of business however was to find even more space. I soon found that having a reliable intelligence network was a real attribute and it was through that I discovered that the first floor of 401 Lebreton was also on the market and we got that without a shot being fired so to speak.

A part of it unfortunately had been bequeathed to the Department of Fisheries Fish Kitchens , which were set up to sample the fish being canned for the military under contract. A lot of us subsequently joined their tasting panels, which was a good way to get a free lunch. Then there was the day when a consignment of rotten Tuna fish arrived and the whole area stank to high heaven for days. This raised questions in the House of Commons as the opposition of the day spawned the Tuna Fish Scandal.

Even then it was clear that we were going to need more space and I laid out the options as I saw them for McLaren (Doc 6A-2), (Doc 8A-2). The Mr. G. Lefort frequently referred to, was the Senior Advisor at the Energy Mines & Resources EMR Property Planning and Management Division. (Energy Mines and Resources was the name of the Department at that time, and its Property Planning and Management Division was referred to as PP&M.)

Renovation of 401 Lebreton was literally attempting to make a silk purse out of a sows ear, but nevertheless it seemed worth the candle because it was so conveniently close to 601. It was going to cost an arm and a leg and that required some formal justification at the highest levels of both EMR and Dep't of Public Works (DPW), That department was the ultimate arbiter when it came to fixing up government buildings, no matter who paid the tab. I provided that justification (Doc 30-2) and it does give a bit of a thumbnail history of how the survey had evolved and what the problems were. Another one (Doc 35-2), explained what we were going to be doing at 401 Lebreton.

Financing
This was a classic example of smoke and mirrors and shifting ground rules. and it continued like that almost all the way through. The first sign of trouble was when DPW simply returned all requisitions for any ongoing work on the grounds that we had to show that the cash was in our annual budget for that year. By this time, things had gelled a bit on the requirements for 401 Lebreton and I could see that we were going to be in deep trouble. I sounded the alarm to McLaren (Doc 13), and had a long session with Lefort, following which I shot off another memo to McLaren (Doc 14), with a draft for him to send higher up (Doc 15), which he did. The upshot was that we were expected to commit the funds anyway (from other programs if necessary) and hope to recoup the money in a supplementary request later in the year.

Eventually the planning of the renovations for 401 reached the costing stage and there was a big meeting with DPW, (Doc 16), (Doc 18), (Doc 19). They reckoned that it would cost over a million to do the job, mainly because of the requirement for air conditioning. They said that because it was such an old building, they weren't prepared to put in more than $450,000. This also meant that they wouldn't allow any other department to do so either.

At a later stage the rules of engagement had changed again. A new Treasury Board dictum had come down whereby departments were now to be financially responsible for Tenant Services (routine maintenance minor alterations etc.), while DPW would now only be responsible for Basic Standard Accommodation, like a landlord.

This had major ramifications for all the renovations proposed, both at 601 and 401. I could see that there was going to be a fight over who paid for what. I sent Maxwell an estimate of the costs of everything proposed in both buildings (Doc 25-2) and made a report to McLaren following another meeting with DPW (Doc 27-2), (Doc 29).

Eventually things got sorted out (Doc 43), (Doc 45), but following another meeting with DPW on the renovations at 401, I began to be concerned that they were about to renege on the original agreement about what was to be done, and I reported this to McLaren (Doc 46-2).

Floor Loading
During my travels around the building I visited the fossil collection on the sixth floor, east wing. I was shown the cabinets and the individual drawers full of specimens. I asked how much a drawer weighed and the guy wasn't really sure. I pulled one right out and held it and realised that it must be a good fifteen pounds or more. There were an awful lot of these cabinets in that open area and having a physics/engineering background I wondered what the floor loading for the building was.

Meanwhile, I asked the guy in charge if he would get me the weights for the steel cabinets (empty) and come up with the average weight for the drawers. This he did and his handwritten calculations are shown in (Doc 22). The total weighed in at a horrifying forty-five tons! I got on to DPW right away and asked for the official floor loadings for the building. I was really concerned because I knew that if that portion of the sixth floor let go and all those cabinets started to descend - they wouldn't stop at the fifth, and we would have a major catastrophe on our hands.

The plans arrived and sure enough, there was a serious overload situation there, subsequently confirmed by DPW, following a visit by their structural people (Doc 61). I have included a copy of these floor loading data for 601 at the end of the package. This actually triggered off a full scale investigation by DPW and they found that various other locations were in trouble, particularly the ground floor where the raw materials (crushed rocks) for the mineral sets sold to the public, were kept in bins.

Sample Storage
The problem created by generations of field people digging up Canada and bringing it back to 601 Booth St. in little sample bags, was just as bad then as it probably is now, (Doc 7-2). The annual influx at that time filled about one hundred rock cabinets a year.

Among the many places that I visited was the basement. There I found row upon row of rock cabinets eating up the whole floor and I wondered how many of them were ever visited. I opened several at random and found that while some had documentation (something cryptic like: Bear-Slave survey 1923 for example), most had nothing of any kind. I was beginning to get the impression that probably most of these collections were in effect tombstones to the many dear departed geologists (either retired or dead, or both), who had toiled through many summers decades earlier.

I went to Ira Stevenson, the deputy chief of REG, who were the major sample collectors at that time, and asked him innocently if there was good documentation for all those rock cabinets in the basement. It was a loaded question of course, but to his credit he started to dig around and discovered that indeed there was not, which came as absolutely no surprise to me. That triggered off some activity inasmuch as John Wheeler (deputy director of the GSC), decided to strike a Sample Storage Committee (Doc 21), (Doc 23).

This in turn provoked a hard look at the whole storage problem and by April 1975 there was some consideration of looking for more space outside the building (Doc 32-2). I agreed to try and do that and wrote a heart-rending memo to Property Planning and Management (Doc 33-2). I was getting pretty good at special pleading. This resulted in a visit by a man from DPW, who reacted with gratifying shock and horror to my carefully orchestrated tour of the worst places (Doc 40-2). By August 1975, we had got some of the space we were looking for at #5 Temporary Building on Carling Avenue, (Doc 64), (roughly where the public parking opposite Dow's Lake now is), and I was grabbing anything more I could get, (Doc 69), (Doc 70).

This Temporary building was one of many built during the second World War at various places around the city. They were very Spartan wooden structures, most were two storeys and they had incredibly creaky floors, covered in brown linoleum. The heating was by water radiators, which would periodically let off steam like a ship's whistle, to the accompaniment of subterranean gurglings and rumblings throughout the plumbing. They were eventually demolished one by one, the last one going somewhere in the 80's. I spent the winter of 1957-58 in #8, beside #5 on Carling Avenue, so I know whereof I speak. I had arrived from England in the summer of 1957 and was then with the Canadian Hydrographic Service. At the time it was a part of this department which had just been renamed to Mines and Technical Surveys, but we continued to use up the supply of headed notepaper under the old name Department of Natural Resources. (Plus ca change....).

Evolution of plan for 601 Booth St.
One of the first things I did was to order up a computer program from my colleague Mike Holroyd, (Doc 2), which would allow me to pour the GSC phone directory in and print out lists of the inhabitants by floor; by division; by room number; and by numerical order of telephone number. The only way to check the accuracy of all of this was literally to go round and poke one's head into each and every room and note down the number, the telephone number and the name, rank and serial number of each occupant.

I got the various division admin officers to do this and the final result was really very useful indeed (Doc 78). I tried to get Fern Casey interested in having the directory on the computer from then on, but she didn't think it was necessary (Doc 111).

I had managed to persuade a group from Terrain Sciences and another one from my own division (RGG) to take the plunge and occupy 401 Lebreton. The bait in both cases was a promise of more space and better equipped labs than they had at 601. That did not solve the whole problem by a long shot and we still needed to move more people out.

We had been offered space in the Tower, but it wasn't enough and no one wanted to go to open plan space anyway. The breakthrough came when I heard tell of space breaking loose at 588 Booth St., the original departmental H.Q. before the Tower was built. The accommodation was definitely business class, roomy offices with wood panelling, and I reckoned that I wouldn't have much trouble tempting a suitable group into going there. The problem was, which group?

It wouldn't do for any group with laboratory or other special equipment needs, it would have to be people who were doing paper work. That constraint led me to the Precambrian subdivision of REG. They spent their summers in the field and their winters writing up their notes for publication as papers, and drafting maps which the cartographers would turn into professionally prepared printed versions. They were also just about the right size to fit the available space.

I knew that the big problem would be - pride. This would be sacrilege, like shouting in church, equivalent to moving the operating theatre and the surgical team out of the hospital and dumping it in the administration building. I floated the idea with John Maxwell and after he had recovered he said that from the logistics point of view it made perfect sense. John Reesor (REG chief) and Walter Fahrig (the Precambrian subdivision head), didn’t see it quite that way, but the other division chiefs and McLaren agreed that under the circumstances the logistics outweighed other considerations and it was done, (Doc 62-2).

One possibility that had intrigued me was extension of the eighth floor at 601 (Doc 6-2). It now has (or had at that time) a relatively small amount of laboratory space, but all the elevators (two for people and the freight elevator), go up there. This led me to suspect that the original design allowed for future additions to this floor. The people at Property Planning and Management thought it would be feasible,(Doc 4) but we didn't pursue the idea any further.

I still wonder if some extension of it for open plan accommodation would be an option. The use of modern light-weight prefabricated construction materials and techniques might make it possible to do that relatively quickly.

There was a lot of negotiation - and a fair amount of unhappiness, involved in getting 601 sorted out. By May 1975 I had a skeleton plan, involving fairly extensive moves, renovations and modifications (Doc 37-2). Peter Harker (chief of GIP) was very unhappy at the prospect of moving two of the cartographic units to the Tower, (Doc 53-2), which I had recommended. Maxwell interceded with McLaren to make sure this would happen (Doc 55-2), and prodded him to ask for more space in the Tower. At the same time he drew attention to the piecemeal air conditioning that was going on in 601 (Doc 57). I drafted yet another heart-breaker memo for Digby McLaren to send to the ADM, begging for twice as much space as had been offered in the Tower (Doc 58), and to everyone's surprise - we got it.

Meanwhile I got Property Planning and Management on side by suggesting that they were the experts at this sort of thing and we would value their involvement, and Oh, by the way, could they please spare a draftsman to help draw up the plans for the modifications which were being worked out. (Doc 39). That, as it turned out, was a very good move indeed.

Interestingly the draftsman, Jack Vining, who ended up sticking with us for the whole project, is still there. I checked the online directory and he is listed as a Portfolio Manager. He is probably the only one left over there with a detailed knowledge of the architecture of 601 Booth St., and might be a worthwhile contact.

There was quite a bit of special pleading, but as the special-pleader par excellence, I grew a thick skin (Doc 71-3), (Doc 73A). Even John Maxwell indulged (Doc 48-2). At this time my classification was PC-3 and at times I was rather uncomfortable in having to arbitrate/mediate over battles between division chiefs. I have to say they never pulled rank on me and treated me with more respect than I probably deserved. (see the exchange of notes I had with John Wheeler, also in the previous document).

By October 1975 I had succeeded in fitting all the pieces together and unveiled the plan to the senior management (Doc 79-2). One of the many minor frustrations was the requirement for a French Language Unit in every government agency. The holy grail of true bilingualism was just as elusive then as it is now, and in an effort to break the barrier of token bilingualism, Treasury Board decreed that there must be whole units which actually operated en francais. This of course put a spanner in the works when it came to juggling groups around.

The plans for 401 LeBreton St (still 299 Carling at that point), were now pretty firm and I called a grand meeting which included the staff who would be going there, the people from Property Planning and Management, the DPW representatives and their consultants and architects. My idea was to have a sort of Speak now, or forever hold your peace session, where the inhabitants of the new space would have a chance to cross-examine those responsible for the renovations in some detail. As far as I could tell they seemed satisfied and I briefed McLaren on the proceedings (Doc 81-3).

I was beginning to get cold feet about the whole thing at this stage. Almost a year had gone by since I had started on this project and no actual work had even begun at 601. I was afraid that by the time it was underway, we would be overtaken by events as the goal posts shifted yet again due to some new crisis. I asked for comments - and I received them! (Doc 86), (Doc 87), (Doc 88). I did some private soul-searching along with rebuttals to the comments (Doc 89-2). I was also concerned about the rapidly increasing amount of data transmission over phone lines to and from the Computer Science Centre at 588 Booth St. (Doc 91).

I was now very anxious to have some formal acceptance of the plan by senior management, which would in effect make the disruption which I knew would follow, a shared responsibility. (They were being paid a lot more than I was to do just that!) Accordingly I got John Maxwell to put it on the agenda for the next GSC Executive meeting. The whole deal was thrashed out fairly thoroughly at that meeting (Doc 92-3), which was I think the first time senior management had any sort of round table discussion about it. Until then they as individuals had responded to the various memoranda which Maxwell and I churned out, but really had not paid all that much attention to it. Digby McLaren dutifully signed memoranda that I shoved under his nose, but I had the impression that they mostly thought that since someone was taking care of the space problem they really didn't have to worry about it.

I heard rumours of more space becoming available at 588 Booth St., and suggested to Maxwell that we put in a bid (Doc 95). We did (Doc 96), but the reply was ambivalent (Doc 97), I probably overplayed my hand on that occasion. If I had asked for just 3,000 sq. ft. instead of 6,000, we might have got it.

Now that the plan had been accepted, I needed fairly detailed sketches of the various modifications that had been agreed on. (Doc 98).

Meanwhile the work at 401 Lebreton was well underway and still needed my attention (Doc 99-2), (Doc 101).

It was April 1976 before I got all of the detailed sketches. I then slotted them into well defined packages, so that the work involved could be scheduled as independent mini-projects, with the sequencing so arranged that everyone had somewhere to live while modifications to their areas were going on. (Doc 102-2). In that memo I also sounded the alarm about the proliferation of phone lines for data transmission, and suggested that the time had come for the appointment of a Branch Communications Officer. I drafted a memo for McLaren to send to the ADM to set the wheels in motion (Doc 104). I got some responses to my concern over the data communications problem (Doc 108), (Doc 112), which show the primitive level of information technology at that time!

It was June 1976 before I was able to distribute the schedule of what would happen when, and who would move to where and when. I warned that there would be a lot of pain and that the whole process would take at least 18 months. Privately I was concerned that the goal posts would be practically certain to shift again before then - either the objectives would change, or the financing would dry up. There was cause for cautious optimism however in the September memo from Property Planning and Management (Doc 113), laying out the schedule. I relayed this on to senior management, saying that I thought that the PP& M target date of March 1978 was too optimistic, and that March 1979 was probably more realistic. (Doc 114).

Things did indeed drag on and by July 1978, while most of it had been implemented, there was still much to be completed. We had a meeting with PP& M at that point and the decision was made to soldier on, rather than risk losing the funding. One of the new elements was political whim. From time to time the government of the day elects to move blocks of public servants to different regions of the country to achieve some objective or other, which they perceive as being necessary for the good of the nation.

In this case there was a proposal in 1978 to move a large chunk of the GSC to Thunder Bay (Doc 119-2). Had it happened, there would obviously have been a major dislocation of the organisation, although the grim irony would have been that it would have greatly mitigated the accommodation problem in Ottawa! In the event of course it did not happen and it turned out to be one of the many banana skins out there that we were fortunate to avoid.

Brush Fires
These were many and various, but as always, needed to be dealt with. Among the more irritating were the demands for five and ten year forecasts of space requirements (Doc 42), (Doc 84-2). Most were routine (Doc 12,) (Doc 24), (Doc 51), (Doc 52), (Doc 60), (Doc 76), (Doc 117), (Doc 118).

Epilogue
In retrospect I think that my plan for 601 was too ambitious. In government nothing is stable, the goal posts are always moving and the financing is always subject to cancellation. Any plan with a completion target of more than a year, risks being overtaken by events. Small self contained mini-projects are probably the best way to go even if it isn't very efficient. You are working in an incredibly inefficient environment anyway and you just have to deal with it as best you can.

That said I wish you a safe passage. You have more collective clout than I had, so maybe you will be able to get to the promised land in a more timely manner.

Yours sincerely,

Quentin Bristow.