AS I am sure you can all too easily imagine, it's a special experience to work in the Donegall Street Shangri-La that is the Irish News offices.
There is one major downside, however, at least as far as I am concerned - the grind of the daily commute.
Time off work this week has provided welcome respite from the twin perils of the M1 and Westlink.
In my case, it's a 40-miles-ish round trip, demoralising and energy-sapping in equal measure, that serves to highlight the inadequacy of our roads infrastructure, as well as some alarming driving habits from fellow motorists.
I join the M1 at junction nine, from the Moira roundabout, and you can usually rely on getting a few miles before the scarlet flash of brake lights tells you that the stop-start slog is about to begin.
It's like this from Blaris and Sprucefield, all the way to Belfast, until I escape the Westlink at Clifton Street. Broken down lorry days are even more hellish, so too those when a crash is involved.
Further frustrations include the chancers who swerve off the M1 at the Applegreen service station, only to re-join seconds later way ahead of where they would have been if they had stayed on the road and not driven at high speed through a car park.
A similar cheat is played on the Westlink. Here, drivers move in to the Divis Street slip-road - the lane is clearly marked 'city centre only' - but then change lanes to the right so they can re-join the Westlink ahead of where they would otherwise have been.
I have never seen the police enforce correct behaviour at either point.
The length of time this journey takes has, for no apparent reason, increased during this year.
It isn't as if there has been a sudden surge in vehicle numbers since September, yet a trip that can at best take 25 or 30 minutes now routinely takes more than an hour each morning. The homeward leg is similarly torturous.
I don't remember it being as bad even when the Broadway underpass was being constructed; friends and colleagues on the same slog agree.
So far, so anecdotal. But this routine misery meant I was particularly interested in last week's report by the audit office which highlighted in aggregate just how useless the Stormont Executive - remember it? - and our government departments are at actually building stuff.
Infrastructure project after infrastructure project has gone over-budget and missed its deadline.
For example, the badly needed A5 upgrade, which is intended to improve the road between Newbuildings in Co Derry and Aughnacloy in Tyrone, is currently £300 million over-budget and 10 years past its original completion date.
It isn't just roads projects that the government has a problem with.
The Regional Children's Hospital has overrun by five years and chalked up a £130m overspend; work still hasn't started on the Casement Park stadium, though it's somehow managed to already go £33m over-budget; the critical care centre at the Royal Victoria Hospital has over-run by eight years and £57m; I could go on.
Clearly these are large and complex projects, with the potential to run into multiple difficulties.
But the scale of the calamities surrounding these supposedly 'flagship' projects in Northern Ireland seems to be of a different order entirely.
Unsurprisingly, Kieran Donnelly, the comptroller and auditor general, has called for a "change in approach" in how the government goes about these building projects.
The cumulative effect of the budget overruns is, of course, that there is less money to spend on other new infrastructure.
Mr Donnelly's report identified total overspending of more than £600m. If we had saved even half of that, we could be well on our way to the much-needed York Street interchange; thousands of drivers would have a quicker commute, and our motorways wouldn't be brought to a standstill by traffic lights.
