Cubicle "eavesdropping"; blogs threaten journalists
Category: Kitchen Sink...
Posted Wednesday, April 30, 2003 at 07:14 AM [GMT-6]

In this edition: "Open Plan" office layouts...Blogs threaten Oldline Journalism?

Today's Wall Street Journal's regular "workplace column" (known as "Cubicle Culture") focuses on the hearing problems of cubicle dwellers...as in, "hearing waaaay too much." It seems that many who work in "open plan" layouts refuse to practice self-censorship when it comes to discussing intimate details of their lives in earshot of their co-workers, and those co-workers are, of course, a captive audience.

As far as Tom Underwood was concerned, the women in the check-writing department were sweet and friendly. The seven of them, all elderly, would converse while the 32-year-old insurance executive was temporarily stationed at a desk next to theirs.



Forming a kind of support group, the women would talk about their problems -- problems with their kids and grandkids. A mild distraction, sure, but none of this particularly bothered Mr. Underwood. But when one of them started bellyaching about the lack of full-figure fashions, Mr. Underwood couldn't lose the image. When one of them then pondered aloud the potential root cause of her gastrointestinal discomfort, the conversation stuck in his ears.



"When you're really concentrating on trying to get something done, it can just destroy you," says Mr. Underwood.

I've worked in open plan offices on a couple of different occasions (although I didn't know until now that that's what they were called...we referred to them as "bullpens," if we referred to them at all). The first was a college job, working on campus in the "repro-graphics" department as a multi-lith operator and general go-fer. I was the only male in the office; my co-workers were middle-aged-and-up women, mothers and grandmothers working at secretarial and administrative tasks. The only intensely personal comments I recall hearing on the job actually came from a younger secretary who came into our office "suite" to use the photocopier and announce how wonderful it was to have an, um, "encounter" with her husband at lunch. I did learn of one matron's fondness for Private Cellar whiskey — her own admission, at that; not some tattle-tale gossip — but in most cases, the conversations in my presence were pretty discreet.

Later, my first job out of college was in the accounting department of a major oil company in Dallas. Only the supervisors and managers had offices; only the senior accountant (and programmers!?) had cubicles; the rest of us worked in big open areas populated with clusters of desks. We even shared phones, two or three to a unit. There again, I don't recall ever being overly distracted by inappropriate conversation. Perhaps I was too focused on work; perhaps my co-workers were oddly fixated on the tasks for which they were being well-paid.

I won't try to tell you that it wasn't a relief and a pleasure to finally graduate to a cubicle and then to an office, but working in the bullpen also wasn't the hellhole experience that seems to be the norm today. What's the difference between then and now? My guess is that people were more discreet and more considerate back then. There are some subjects meant for public consumption and some which should be confined to private conversations; fewer people nowadays seem to know the difference.

Now that I work in a one-person home office, I have to confess that I have a certain nostalgia for the low-level buzz of conversation from the "old days." Although the increasingly insistent voices in my head seem to be filling the void ["No, they're not!" "Yes, they are!"].

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Good article by Donald Sensing over at One Hand Clapping about the threat to "real journalism" being posed by blogs. As the saying goes, just because you're not paranoid, doesn't mean everyone is not out to get you.