Opinion
Give me back my landline, my desk drawers, and my dreary old office
Richard Glover
Broadcaster and columnistAre you lucky enough to be in a modern, cutting-edge office building? Oh, it’s great. Space is at a premium, so the desks are placed really close together. That way, you get to hear everything that’s going on in the business.
The breakdown of the air conditioning in the Perth office? Mate, you are right across it. The bowel obstruction being suffered by the deputy manager’s dog? Should others require details, you discover you have them all.
Of course, having all the desks so close together provides space for 27 bookable meeting rooms, which no one ever uses. I suppose you could pop into one and use it to pray. For example, “Dear Lord, could you make everyone shut up?”
Ah, now that’s a proper office space.Credit: iStock
Overcrowding, however, is not usually a problem. In most offices, everyone now works from home. The modern office building is little more than an over-engineered billboard for the company’s name. I know this from walking through the public square in front of the office tower in which I work. In our office, we all turn up, but other workplaces appear empty. There’d be more people on the main street of Yass.
Except on Wednesdays. There’s a convention, it seems, that workers attend work on a Wednesday, so it’s suddenly like the Royal Easter Show. Four days a week, the place is full of empty car parks; mid-week, and it’s the Hunger Games.
This may explain other aspects of the modern office. For a start, there are no bins, at least not the small bin I once had underneath my office desk. Why employ someone to empty the bins when no one turns up to work? And so each time you have something to throw away – an apple core, a twisted paper clip, a plastic wrapper – you’re meant to walk to the other side of the building and “dispose of it thoughtfully”.
“What’s the problem?” I hear you say. “You could just designate one of the drawers in your desk as a rubbish receptacle and empty it once every few days.”
Another feature of the modern office is that everything is ‘self-serve’, accessible via a computer interface designed to break your spirit.
Great idea, except desk drawers are also banned. They’d get in the way of the sleek lines and cutting-edge atmosphere. Instead, you are meant to pile all your personal stuff on top of your desk, pushing it to one side or the other should you wish – in some mad flurry of productivity – to actually use your keyboard.
These hillocks of personal items are helpful as you can learn all about your co-workers. This one has asthma (there’s her Ventolin inhaler); this one (me) is taking too much Ibuprofen for his dodgy knee; and this one (neurotic!) has enough COVID masks to survive the next four pandemics.
Yes, but there’s a wall of lockers up the other end of the building – bookable by the day, just use the QR code – in which you could choose to put your Ventolin, your Ibuprofen, and your ear wax removal kit. But who can be bothered, especially when you’re so flat-out disposing of rubbish?
Bookshelves, by the way, are also forbidden due to a belief that all printed material is available online, which is a lovely idea if only it were true. The notion that there are mountains of books that have never been digitised is not an idea that strikes the modern office designer as plausible. Neither is the notion that you might have much-used books festooned with Post-it notes that you can pull from the shelf and use in an instant.
Oh, and landline phones – limited in number - have to be booked should you wish to use one. “Everyone uses their mobile anyway”. “Oh, and can you supply a company mobile for work calls?” “No, just use your own. You’ll be on a plan, so it won’t cost you anything”.
Another feature of the modern office is that everything is “self-serve”, accessible via a computer interface designed to break your spirit. Need to book a holiday? Or perhaps register a sick day, while attaching the necessary certificate from your doctor? Just hit the link in the “people hub”, and within minutes – by which I mean hours – you’ll have worked out how to do it.
You’ll collect your own mail from the mail room, of course. This is necessary since the company sacked all the people in the mailroom, along with the people who emptied the bins and – long-forgotten – the lady who used to bring everyone a cup of tea.
So senior executives, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, spend half their time walking to the bin, picking up their own mail, or trying to attach the doctor’s certificate for their sick leave.
Oh, sorry, the senior executives are exempt. They just make the rules for others. They are gluttons for the sort of efficiency that leads to less efficiency.
Is there anything that’s better about the modern office, compared to the dreary old office? Actually, the new carpet is rather good. And, for the time being, there are lots of forks in the kitchen.
All the same, who’d have thought that one day, I’d spend so much time fantasising about having a set of drawers and a rubbish bin?
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