Open-Office Snake Oil

The open-office plan was never intended to improve access, spark creativity, foster innovation or foment collaboration. Open-office is command and control owners asking,

How can we shave overhead and, as a bonus, demean our workforce?

Open-office is a physically recorded testament to the wholesale disregard for people producing wealth for others. Open-office is yet another depravation milestone in the spiraling degradation of the middle class workforce.

"I had an office. Now I don’t."
- Jason Feiffer

An office landscape floor plan

Cubicle Plan

My first gig out of engineering school I was given a private office overlooking the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis (circa 1989). Since then my creature comforts have been steadily replaced with reminders not to get too comfortable.

Today I am a contract software developer wedged next to a load-bearing column sitting on a bed of razors. I have had to furnish my own MacBook which is set up on the employer's folding table where I am working madly to row the boat for the fat, dumb & disengaged.

Sure I've had gigs were I'm allowed to work from home, but I value employers who still provide workspace for my team. I half-jokingly wonder if my next engagement letter will read,

"Contractor must provide his own MacBook, chair, internet access, pens, paper and workspace because Ownership is short-sighted, risk averse, and greedily milking every penny of the coffers dry."

Some oppose an open-office plan because they find their silent-farting, loud-talking coworkers off putting. Not me. I love my co-workers. Unlike the fat, dumb & disengaged who own this hell hole, we get shit done.

The raison d'être for open-office is it's cheaper & it fleeces the last shred of worker dignity. I love collaborating with my teammates, but open-office layouts have the viscosity of bean counting snake oil.

REFERENCES

• Do you Hate your Open-Office Layout?, Miles Kohrman, Fast Company.
• Offices for All! Why Open-Office Layouts are Bad for Employees, Bosses, and Productivity, Jason Feifer, Fast Company.
• Open Plan, Wikipedia.

Imagining the World in Games

Many of my waking hours as a boy were given over to imagining and playing solo games like Bedroom Hoops Basketball; Front-Yard Mini-Football; Concrete Foundation Backstop Baseball; and Stick Pebble Home Run Derby. In this imaginary world I played each athletic position, provided play-by-play narration, and listened to the roaring crowd noises in my mind. I conjured leagues of teams comprised of fictitious personalities who generated real and meticulously recorded statistics.

And as an adolescent insomniac I'd conduct Finger Boxing matches where my left-hand index finger would pluck my right-hand index finger, and vice versa. When my left-hand index finger received a roundhouse pluck, it'd stagger then strike back. After rounds of stinging blows from the left and the right, one finger would deliver the knock out that ended the match.

Imagination is fertile ground. Games engage us, but more importantly, games can motivate inquiry and inspire a deeper understanding of observable events and phenomena.

Communities

Game designer Jane McGonigal demonstrates the brilliant Massively Multi-Player Thumb Wrestling in her TED talk. With the novelty of thumb wresting as a communal activity, she describes the opportunity for participants to experience ten positive emotions in 60 seconds or less. Emotions like joy, relief, love, surprise, pride, curiosity, excitement, wonder, contentment, and creativity.

Humans are an emotion-seeking species. Emotions engage and grip us. And emotions experienced through communal activities can be a powerful community-building potion.

My early imaginary games were a self-indulgent escape hatch from boredom, but today I brainstorm about competitive games that might bring people together through shared experiences of the world.

One such game is GrokEarth.

Grok is a word coined by science fiction writer Robert Heinlein that means to understand intuitively or by empathy.

GrokEarth is competition based on live earthquakes occurring around the earth. Participants select GPS stations around the world. A participant's stations accrue daily points based on their proximity to the seismic jostling of the Earth's crust. Whether we feel the earthquakes or not, hundreds of them are recorded daily in our largest cities and remotest islands. The higher the magnitude of the earthquake, and the closer the GPS stations are to the epicenter, the more points accrued.

Games like GrokEarth have promise as educational tools. To gain a competitive edge one must inquire and acquire a deeper understanding.

Sacred Places

I'm human-centric. It's all I know.

Interpretations of the sacred and sublime are random and subjective.

Interpretations are nevertheless real because we perceive them as verifiably repeatable. I have experienced places that can only be described as sacred.

Sacred places are physical and mental loci we return to for solace, well-being, peace, and good tidings.

On Pete's Hill  looking west at the Tobacco Root Mountains

“There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”
― Wendell Berry, Given