Posted on 12/16/2015 10:14:43 AM PST by Kaslin
The scene would be familiar to those of us of a certain age: a gray sea of metal desks at which clerks sit from 9 to 5 clacking away at typewriters or old-fashioned adding machines, making carbon copies (remember them?) that no one may ever look at. Or forever recording rows of figures.
The popularity of "Mad Men" on television, that trip back in time, brought back the whole, narrow-tie, Borsalino era. I used to ride the Chicago & Northwestern commuter line with what seemed like a million such Mad Men, and was one myself as I headed home to suburban Glenview, Ill., after a day writing editorials for the Chicago Daily News -- and watching the life being edited out of them.
If it were a landscape, such an office could be titled the Sea of Futility, a place Charlie Chaplin anticipated in "Modern Times" back in the Depression year 1936, only without the hectic pace he was so good at transmitting on the screen. For nothing so fast and dramatic could happen at a 1960-ish corporate shrine to ennui. The typical office in those days was Kafka without the art or mystery. Surely it's no coincidence that Franz Kafka's day job was that of actuary in a state bureaucracy.
To appreciate or rather apprehend the dismal quality of that kind of office, all it takes is a scene or two from a movie like "The Apartment" (1960), in which an innocent schnook -- lovable Jack Lemmon -- is exploited by the office womanizer and jerk-in-general played by Fred MacMurray. Every office seemed to have one: the villainous climber to whom the little people out there were just furniture to rearrange from time to time.
It's in a similar movie, "Office Space" (1999), that one of the characters captures the air of despair that seemed to hover over such places. "We don't have a lot of time on this earth," he says. "We weren't meant to spend it this way."
Picture such an office: Lining this Bay of Boredom in the 1960s were private offices for those slightly higher in the pecking order. Those offices doors could actually be shut -- and so afforded a minimal privacy where middle managers could study their spreadsheets when they weren't giving full attention to office politics. Those little cubbyholes were coveted, and there's no telling how much ingenuity was wasted in conniving to get one.
But all that changed, or at least took on a different configuration, as the 1960s melded into the 1970s, and Robert Propst came along to redesign the office. A talented designer with Herman Miller, the office furniture company, he called the American office of his time a wasteland that "saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort." Not to mention Thoreau's lives of quiet desperation that he said most of us live. Robert Propst's diagnosis was all too accurate.
What to do? Mr. Propst had the answer, or thought he did. Just change the design of the office! For what are we but the products of our built environment? Change our offices, and we can change ourselves. Make the office more human and we would all be human again. Voila!
So was born the concept and reality that would change the office world, and become the most dreaded word in the American lexicon: Cubicle.
That's a lot of weight for a single word, and idea, to bear. Especially when the cubicle was so simple an innovation: just a three-sided, open-ended box that was supposed to assure privacy and at the same time invite cooperation ("meaningful traffic"). For a personal touch, add a fern. Action Office II, introduced in 1968, was born to rave reviews. Eureka!
The sides of the box could be widened or narrowed to fit the status of its occupant at the time, small or great, little person or big cheese. By 1985 the World Design Conference hailed the cubicle as the most successful design of the past quarter-century. By 1998, an estimated 40 million of us worker bees were busy in 42 different variations of Action Office II. I worked in one at the late Chicago Daily News for an excruciating year.
Interviewed once for a job at Time magazine by one of its top editors, I noticed that his spacious office was just a cubicle writ large. Its walls could be expanded to suit an executive's rise -- or constricted as he fell in the corporate table of organization.
We spent most of my interview with the Time editor talking about Salinger and John Updike, who were all the rage at the time. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" remains a kind of underground bible for young people who think they're the first generation to discover that their elders are a bunch of phonies.
By the time Time came through with a job offer, I was already headed back South in not so quiet desperation. It was no surprise to learn years later that the exec at Time, a nice enough fellow of no particular talent, had been squeezed out. The walls had literally closed around him. The cubicle had claimed another of its own.
The size of the space for an employee had/has nothing to do with status. It is cost per square foot with an office layout design that uses the smallest amount of square feet per employee. It is also designed to be able to change layouts as business changes.
clerks sit from 9 to 5 clacking away at typewriters or old-fashioned adding machines, making carbon copies
Walls and doors are classified by the IRS as physical plant and have to be depreciated over 49 years. Cubicles are office furniture and can be depreciated over, I believe, seven years. That’s the real reason nobody gets an office anymore. It has nothing to do with productivity. If anything, the noise and distractions of a cubicle environment reduce productivity.
I’m employed by a billion dollar corporation and in a brand new campus environment just built this year
Gone are the cubes as we are now in an open office environment with no cubicle walls at all. Just desks with 4 feet dividers serving as cabinet/file space.
I miss my cubicle.
Flexibility is probably far more important than anything else. More and more companies are migrating to a flexible work space model where their employees don't spend all their time in the same place.
It’s hard to surf the innertubes with lame coworkers looking over my shoulder!
I’m still trying to figure out how this guy took the C&NW to Glenview...the Cardboard & No Wheels didn’t (and still doesn’t) go anywhere near Glenview. That’s Milwaukee Road country.
Ditto that.
So do I.
The old-style office (if the managers were not tyrants...and mine weren't) were much more conducive to a type of office camaraderie. Not saying I loved my job, but I liked having a more open environment than working in what was basically a tiny closet i.e. the cubicle.
Would we have Dilbert without cubicles?
There is a very strange BBC show available on Netflix called W1A, a comedy about office life at the BBC, it is funny but takes some time to get used to it, it demonstrates how ineffective business has become because of office structure or no office structure, and politically correct language which is so bad it is hard to follow until you realize that is the whole point.
Because they can be re-arranged a lot faster and easier than walls and doors. Things can also be remade to have never existed.
I think people are too rude now, you would go nuts without some kind of separation. Also I know I can concentrate better without visual clutter/commotion and conversations of everyone else coming in without any cube walls.
My employer is old skool and I feel lucky to still have a nice 8x8 cube to roll around in,,, when not packed with work..
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