Escape

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Holy shit I would take this over an open floor plan any day. I dream of having my own quasi-isolated space.

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It’s because corporations being corporations and took the concept of workspace partitions to its limits for the sake of efficiency. Look at early concepts of workspace partitions and it doesn’t look like anything that’s the office hellscape we saw in the late 90’s and early 2000s. It went from good design with big partitioned off sections to crammed cubicles in a soulless environment.

Same thing happened with the modern open office plan where everyone got crammed into a flex desk bull pen instead of the proper open office design where everyone has a big private desk where you sit several feet away from each other.

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Heh. "Escape". No one gets out alive.

don

Well, hey, I appreciate that. I’ll get out of your way. Thank you!

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I wouldn't find the backrooms scary if it had plenty of cubicles

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Yeah, seeing an entire room filled with cubes is very ugly and stifling, but as an introvert I'd want at least one place where I can just work out of sight as it reduces my stress levels significantly.

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Nailed it. I was going to say scary because it looks like Morpheus is about to call you. But yes. This.

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They hated them because before that people had offices. Then someone decided why pay all this money for offices, when we can put up these shitty dividers and pack more people into this space. Then some other dickheads decided why bother paying for these dividers when we can pack even more people into this space, and sell the idea as “open” and “collaborative”. And if you don’t like it (because you can’t concentrate for shit in this loud ass hellscape) then you’re not a “team player”.

Does that answer your question?

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I was told, I could listen to the radio, at a reasonable volume.

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Yeah, that's not happening. Here, let me jabber about things you have no interest in, while you try to remain professional and polite yet still try to diagnose and resolve the issue. Kill me....

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Would be a pretty interesting inversion of the escape room trope. Group of people get sent into cubicles and instead of solving puzzles have to fill in tps reports and make sales projection presentations to each other to be let out

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I did this to some players in a d&d session but wasn't thinking of the tps reports exactly. The party met an insane ghost who had died from working herself to death as a library curator. The party initially tried to be her friendly but snuck into a secret room and got caught. She attacked and the party wasn't equipped to handle a ghost and she was several levels higher than them. The party quickly realized they weren't going to be able to kill her so they surrendered and offered to help her with her work since she had insisted she still needed to do her reports. She agreed and put them in this tiny room and made them fill out the reports. For the first 10 IRL minutes the players thought i was just going to handwaive letting them escape after a while but i could've killed them all so i wasn't going to reward their recklessness. No, it ended up being an impromptu escape room where the ghost library curator frequently popped through one of the walls to yell at them and demand more work from them. They had to devise a plan to escape. I had planned on them trying to sneak out in between her patrol route but they instead decided to put her to rest by telling her she was dead and that none of the work matters. Bold strategy! In-game the characters were there filling out reports for several hours before the curator acknowledged that the reports didn't matter anymore and that her boss had just used her. They spent spent 20 IRL minutes roleplaying her to rest and eventually escaped the office escape room.

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Herman Miller AO2. Love putting that shit up it’s so easy.

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For 8 years I tried. Finally I got my chance when a global pandemic ravaged my planet. Now they're trying to put me back in.

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Yeah honestly cubes were hell, but still nothing compared to an open office. Especially a well lit ""vibrant"" one.

Good for socialising. Absolute shit for actually working.

ImpulseDrive42

Hello IT... Have you tried turning it off and on again?

𝕾𝖕𝖎𝖈𝖞 𝕿𝖚𝖓𝖆

Same. We don't have the room in my office for everyone to be there all at once so I'm hoping we go hybrid instead. My wife's office is the same. They have 7 rooms for 35 people in her team so unless they stack em shoulder to shoulder, there's no way. Meanwhile, everyone in leadership has their own office. Ain't that some shit?

As for me, my job involves a lot of salary discussions. Now, I don't mind speaking openly about salaries. My personal belief is that salary discussions should be open and public. Not everyone thinks the way I do. And I know that if I'm placed in an open cubicle in a hallway, people to whom I report will not want to talk to me as often. I don't mind either way. I like these people. But if leadership in my organization wants to do that to me, that's probably what's going to happen. It's the nature of my job. I help write budgets and then do entry for nearly $60,000,000 of annual spending, including salaries for about a thousand positions. Nearly half of the entire organization falls under my purview. From division directors making $160k a year all the way down to part time housekeepers making 13 bucks an hour. So if they want me in a cubicle, that's fine. I've done lots of time in cubicles. It doesn't bother me much. But that could be a consequence of doing that to me.

I have an interview coming up for a job that pays twice as much and looks to be about as much work as I do now. I hope I get it. I think that my departure from this place will cause a hell of a fire. Maybe if I'd have got that promotion I'd been hinting at for some time, I wouldn't have updated my resume. But here we are. I am no longer gruntled.

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I have an interview coming up for a job that pays twice as much and looks to be about as much work as I do now. I hope I get it. I think that my departure from this place will cause a hell of a fire. Maybe if I’d have got that promotion I’d been hinting at for some time, I wouldn’t have updated my resume. But here we are. I am no longer gruntled.

Good luck!

And yep, I know exactly what you mean. A while ago I asked for 50k and remote, and boss jerked me around for months on it - moving goalposts, etc. When lo and behold, as soon as I put in my resignation they immediately offered me what I wanted, but of course by then I already had a much better offer in hand.

Whereas, as you know, if you'd properly valued in the first place, you probably wouldn't have been looking for a different job in the first place.

I feel like that's one of the reasons for back to the office bullshit - being in an office makes it harder to interview for jobs.

argv minus one

You'd think they'd love it if everyone worked from home, then. Don't have to pay for office space at all if your employees are already paying for their offices.

Jesus

before that people had offices

This is kind of a myth. It’s not feasible for everyone to have an office if you have a lot of people in once space. Open floor plans were what people did.