Cubes

As in, cubicles.  Didja ever wonder how that monstrous interior architecture of the modern bid'niz world came to be?  Wonder no more... just read this book review ("Away From My Desk") by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker.  An excerpt:

Throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, especially during periods of recession, employees were moved from offices to cubicles. “Dilbert,” written by Scott Adams, who worked in a cubicle for seventeen years, began appearing in 1989. “Most business books are written by consultants and professors who haven’t spent much time in a cubicle,” Adams wrote. “That’s like writing a first-hand account of the experience of the Donner party based on the fact that you’ve eaten beef jerky. Me, I’ve gnawed an ankle or two.” Cubicles, like companies, downsized. “Those three walls had once been meant to liberate office workers, to guarantee their autonomy and freedom,” Saval writes. “But they had finally taken on the image that they have today: the flimsy, fabric-wrapped, half-exposed stall where the white-collar worker waited out his days until, at long last, he was laid off.” In 1997, when BusinessWeek’s editorial staff began the move into cubicles, the magazine reported not only that “some 35 million of the 45 million white-collar workers in this country” were working in cubicles but also that, in a single decade, the size of the average cubicle had decreased by as much as fifty per cent.

I did my time in cubes and that time was less than pleasant.  I think the very best perk of being promoted from "individual performer" to manager was getting an office... a real room with four walls and a door.  Like this:

My place o' bid'niz in Ra-cha-cha, NY, 1998.

But there were (and prolly still are) companies who put almost everyone, up to and including VPs, in cubes.  I know, I worked for one, said one bein' the web start-up in SFO that was my last place o' bid'niz.  There were only two people in the entire company who had hard-wall offices: the CEO and the CFO.  All the rest of us sat in cubes... low-walled cubes.  Like this:

In the office, c. 2000.

That setting wasn't all that bad, mainly coz I had good neighbors and, being senior to all the people around me, I got to choose the music we listened to while we worked (you take the perks you're given, no matter how small they seem).  Another perk at that company: a very relaxed dress code, as you can see.  It was a pretty cool place to work before the dot-bomb implosion ripped our world apart.  But that's quite another story.

We digress.  The evolution of office space is what we're on about and Ms. Lepore's article is a good read for those of us interested in that sort of thing.  Go, read.