Office Spaces
Cyn in office
The other day I was listening to a discussion of a book called Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace by Nikil Saval. It traces the evolution of the modern workplace as economies shifted from agriculture to industry to information-based, leading to the generally formulaic settings we know as offices. The book talks about the history of suspended ceilings and fluorescent lights, typewriters and dictaphones, vertical file cabinets and elevators, and of course, cubicles. “Man is born free," writes Saval, "but he is everywhere in cubicles.”
Well, maybe not everywhere. Silicon Valley offices like Google were mentioned, with their spaces designed to blur the distinction between work and leisure. There was also acknowledgment of the rise of freelancing and other forms of what Saval calls "precarious employment" in an era of insecurity where traditional career paths are vanishing. But for the millions of employees for whom work means going to an office, there is something about the setting that is both predictable and, if you really think about it, weird. The discussion triggered memories for me about the years of my life during which offices were my habitat.
My first office gig was in Chicago. I've used the above photo in a previous post, so it may look familiar, but it's the only picture I have of me in that particular office setting, or any, come to think of it, and that's no surprise–the interior of an office is not usually where people feel like snapping photo memories. I remember the man who took this, a tall Swede named Mr. Sandberg, who walked in with a camera one ordinary day in 1973, asked me to look up, and surprised me with a print a few weeks later. That office was in a skyscraper on Wacker Drive, and I was the front-desk receptionist, which was a lowly position indeed, but everyone stopped and talked to me: the man who came to deliver the mail, the one who tended the plants, secretaries, researchers, department directors, even the big boss, whose name, ironically, was Mr. Bottom.
In addition to answering phones, greeting and announcing visitors, typing letters on that handsome IBM Selectric (taking care to insert carbon paper for a copy), and putting together scrapbooks, as I seem to be doing in the photo, I brought tea or coffee to my superiors twice a day. Needless to say, all but three of my superiors were men. There was one female director, Miss Winifred Potts, a tall, stern woman with the demeanor of an old-fashioned schoolteacher who was clearly married to her career and appeared to be well into her 60s. There were also two younger women in management positions who, although probably no more than five or ten years older than I was, seemed so smart and sophisticated to me that I felt shy around them. They in turn felt awkward about my bringing them coffee and suggested I skip them in my rounds. But the men were fine with this display of servitude, and a few of them also used it as an opportunity to assess my physical attributes as I passed and wink to their cronies.
Oh, I could tell you stories. It's hard to convey the level of blatant sexism in those days, and although the workplace is still not free of it, I sometimes wonder if young women today fully appreciate how much they have benefited from the feminist movement that was just gaining momentum then. For the time and place, however, and given my desperate situation, this was not a bad office. I would take the el straight into the Loop, walk a few blocks to the tall glassy building by the river, and ascend via elevator to the 24th floor. Everything was modern and shiny, corridors were carpeted, and the important men had plush offices with closed doors, brass name plates, and impressive views of the city. It was a relatively quiet kind of office, but typewriters clicked, phones rang, there was a murmur of conversation, and by and large, folks seemed purposeful. Since I basically felt alienated from my entire life, I didn't feel any more or less alienated here, and I was making $425 a month, which wasn't terrible. On the other hand, I also knew I was only passing through.
In the course of the circuitous journey that followed, I found myself doing office work again and again, maybe because typing was my most trusty survival skill. There were temp jobs in small, bleak offices all over the place, and I'm struck in retrospect by how similar they were to one another: fluorescent lights, metal file cabinets, cheap swivel chairs, maybe a space heater by the desk. Later, as I advanced in education and qualified for more professional jobs in public or nonprofit agencies, I sometimes had my own office within an office. These were unimpressive spaces in sometimes seedy buildings, but the distinction was clear: I was now someone who told others what to type, and my desk was not in the shared common area.
Before long it was the early 1980s and word-processors were beginning to replace the typewriters, and no one knew what carbon paper was, and maybe there was a xerox copier, and fax machines could instantly transmit a document over distance. But the phones still had those push buttons that lit up when the line was in use, and the overhead lighting was still bad, and whatever the office, someone always brought donuts, and someone else would tell you that sugar was poison, and there was a pot of bad coffee growing cold but still drinkable. There were colleagues who were competitive and colleagues who became friends, the ones who thought they were captains of the Starship Enterprise, and the ones who did as little as they could get away with.
As for me, I never had a cubicle, but I felt vaguely trapped, and I always found reasons, usually valid but occasionally trumped-up, to be out of the office, until I finally escaped for good.
