Office Space

The trend in office real estate of recent years has been to create more open and common spaces for the peons who do the daily grunt work. It didn’t used to be this way but it’s progressively gotten worse as have people’s workplace manners.


When I first started to work in office buildings, I had my own personal cubicle with tall walls (they didn’t reach the ceiling but still they were pretty high up to cover most tall people’s sight) on 3 sides and a space in the fourth wall that was an entrance to my space. People would need to come into the common aisle in order to see what people were doing at their desks. Normally I didn’t care about people looking in because I was working. But I did know some people who enjoyed this ‘privacy’ because they were known to take naps on the job. If people had phone conversations, they would generally keep their voices low. If the need for gossip arose, they generally kept those discussions in areas away from people’s desks. Overall, I felt productive and could concentrate

The next office I occupied still had three walls but they were much shorter and the fourth wall was missing but because of the spacing of the other 3 walls, it seemed more open than my first one. People could see their co-workers across the aisles but generally everyone minded their own business and kept their personal conversations to a minimum or to a very super quiet decibel level. At that time, people also had meetings in person because everyone they dealt with was usually in the vicinity.

As my business groups have become more spaced out globally, more conference calls were needed. With that requirement, the opening of the space around my desk got bigger and less private and personal. In the last few years, it’s been maddeningly annoying because everyone else is also on as many calls as I am on, or more. Others feel the need to conduct those calls on speaker phone, or while walking around the office so that we can all hear them ‘working’.

I have often become a third party to many very private phone calls without my being complicit in them. I just happen to sit in the row next to these people, for the love of sugar! I don’t want to know these things. They are so loud that even with my ipod in my ears at a high volume, I can hear everything. I feel horrible knowing things about people that I shouldn’t know.

For instance today, I was accosted by a conversation between two co-workers in the area next to mine. They went on for about 20 minutes on how one of them got some great deals on clothes. I turned up the U2 on my ipod but Bono really couldn’t do much to drown out the eyelet top and denim vest that was purchased. I heard the colors and the coupons that were used. I wanted to shoot myself. After this information session finished, I got to hear the clicking of the long fingernails on both of their keyboards. It made my heart flutter and not because spring felt like it finally arrived. It made me want to vomit and not in the same way as my recent spinning class.

Friends have told me to speak up but really, what can you say to certain people? You know the types. When you tell them something nicely and they decide to get even by being even louder. I had the suspicion these people would act that way if I pointed out their loudness to them.

I complained to my friend who said that maybe we should have department heads and executives sit in these open cubes. To which I replied “if they did that, I’d make sure there was a daily visit from a high school marching band.”

It’s so sad that I need to listen to my ipod to drown out other people’s noise while I work. It’s horrendous that this behavior persists and is getting worse. I really don’t know why everyone feels they need to be so inconsiderate. And then people wonder why I dislike going to work in an office. Yes, camaraderie is nice and might be good for innovation. More often than not, it’s a source of high blood pressure and frustration.