blogcutter

Nine years ago today, I started this blog. Here is what I wrote then:

https://blogcutter.dreamwidth.org/2012/03/25/

The main topic was introverts and the extent to which our society is geared to introverts - or not. It's strangely prophetic in some ways, although I certainly hadn't foreseen a pandemic lockdown that would last a year, and counting.

I lamented the popularity of the open-office concept that began around the seventies and was probably largely born out of necessity - the huge influx of the Baby Boom generation into the offices of the nation, and a number of other nations too. There simply wasn't enough office space for every worker to have their own private office with a door and windows you could actually open and close.

Fast-forward with a jolt to today's world of masking and self-isolation and maintaining a minimum two-metre distance from your nearest colleague. Goodbye, in-person teamwork and boring all-day meetings with flip charts and Post-it Notes!

An introvert's dream? For some, maybe.

In that same entry, I also decried the death of casual in-person interactions, substituting self-checkout stations, infuriating telephone trees with branches leading to bewildering cul-de-sacs, and demands that everything be done online - shopping, banking, registering for courses, paying taxes, applying for jobs, pensions and official documentation... and much, much more!

Suffice it to say that the above trends have flourished exponentially over the past year.

Just today, I got a helpful e-mail message from Shopper's Drug Mart informing me I could register to be informed when vaccines become available at my local pharmacy. I obediently filled in the online form providing all the pertinent information and confirmed my e-mail address. Then I had to enter a 6-digit code that Shoppers INSISTED it had just e-mailed to me, before the form could be submitted. I waited. And waited. Aaaand wa a ai t e d. Perhaps 20 minutes later I got it and filled it into the little box. And promptly got a message that the code was incorrect.

This is the Brave New World of 2021 that we live in today.

Opinion seems to be divided these days over what will happen with office space once the pandemic is over. Will people want to keep working from home on a full-time basis? Will they eagerly flock back to their cubicles, re-embracing office politics and office life in general? Or will they put together some sort of hybrid model, going to their offices a couple of days a week for specific in-person meetings or other events while telecommuting the rest of the time?

Certainly that will depend to a great extent on the nature of the job, the nature of the business and the overall corporate culture. But I suspect things may evolve differently from how we expect them to.

When I began my career as an office worker in the 70s, things were moving away from individual offices with doors and windows that really opened and closed. Open-concept offices were all the rage and as time went on, you had to be someone pretty important to get your own enclosed office - or your own secretary (you might, however be allowed to send your scrawled writings to the typing pool to be typed for you or if you were slightly more important, dictate them to a person who knew shorthand or to a machine, to be typed later). As we went through the 1970s and 80s and 90s, offices became a maze of cubicles.

I think I first heard the term "universal footprint" somewhere in the mid-1990s, though really it was a bit of a consolidation of all the thinking that had been going on throughout my career. That one-size-fits-all kind of approach whereby each worker was only entitled to x square metres of personal space, certainly not enough to swing a cat (although the cat might object to that in any case). And keep in mind, this was long before you could store a lot of what you might need in electronic form. So that didn't leave a lot of room for personal files of any kind, or books you were in the process of cataloguing or consulting in order to handle a reference request. In any case, I spent a lot of my career feeling like a little white lab rat in a vast maze of cubicles. It could make it difficult if you were involved in a task that required focus and concentration.

In the first decade of this century, in my offices in Albion Tower (adjoining the Novotel Hotel) and later in a building at Bank & Albert, the Universal Footprint was definitely being taken to heart. If you can believe it, the only physical file space we were entitled to was a 2-drawer cabinet with a thin vinyl cushion on top and wheels on the base - the idea being that if you needed to meet or consult with someone, you'd just wheel it over to that person's cubicle and perch precariously atop it while you spoke with the person. And if you had to meet with two or three people at a time, that definitely made things pretty crowded in one of those cubicles.

So why not book a meeting room, you might well ask? Well, meeting space was at a premium and had to be booked a week or two in advance and even then, always at the risk you might be bumped at the last minute by someone more important than you! And sometimes it might be a spur of the moment thing to consult about something you just couldn't have foreseen an hour or two ago.

Space wasn't the only problem either. There were also major concerns with regards privacy and confidentiality. What if you wanted to discuss a personal health issue or conduct a performance review or deal with a problem of some kind? Usually we'd just go for coffee somewhere but that wasn't necessarily all that private and there'd always be the risk that the very person you DIDN'T want to see would walk in, whether by accident or design.

Oh, and one last point about those infamous file cabinets. They did have a lock but even if they were locked, it turned out that someone could just lift that cushion right off the top and the entire contents of the cabinet would be exposed! Not to mention that with those wheels, you could easily just trundle them off somewhere into permanent file-13 storage.

After several months' worth of enforced physical distancing from our co-workers and in many cases enforced physical proximity to our immediate families, I predict that many people may find themselves longing for the offices of yesteryear. The ones with real human-scaled rooms in them and real people and real real-time conversations and collaborations but also real places to hole up alone and focus on the work at hand. I don't see us totally ditching computers and e-mail and Zoom and whatever technologies may be developed in the future, but perhaps we can look forward to a more thoughtful and appropriate use of the resources we have?