Keep the noise down in that breakout area – I can’t think, myself, here

And that IoT gadget is trying to roger me

Image © 2019 Sarah Richter

ShutupShutupShutuuuuuuup.

There’s a man with an extraordinarily piercing and annoying voice on this floor and I wish he would take his fulsomely resonating gob somewhere else. Blah blah MARKET SYNCHRONISATION blah blah INVESTED INTELLIGENCE blah blah COOPERATIVE DISRUPTION blah blah arse bollocks.

Don’t you just love open-plan offices? Actually, come to think of it, I do. Especially when I’m on contract at a client’s workplace.

It could be claustrophobia that leads me to prefer the airy freedom of a wide open office dotted with a forest of square pillars, like the cathedral at Cordoba reinterpreted as brutalist architecture with blue carpet tiles. Or it could be that I tire of toiling with my co-contractors in our “special projects” ghetto of adjacent cubicles and feel the need to get out of my seat and take a stroll across the main floor – navigating the desk-rippled landscape as I go, the air-conditioned breeze whistling through my hair and the occasional rubber plant leaf whipping across my face.

I’m all up for hiking departmental Skeggie. It’s so bracing!

Or perhaps I just feel lonely in a cubicle. No chance to get lonely here, though! At least, not while megamouth is thundering away with his verbal fart-attack.

Fellow workers have noticed too, of course. As I yomp the office trail, I hear colleagues muttering to each other: “Who is that loud man? Where is he? Why can’t he talk normally?” Even as I reach the other end of the forest, I can still hear him, clear as a bell – albeit a bell that spouts a continuous stream of jargonised turds instead of going “ting!”

I find myself humming: “Shut up! Shut up! Shuuuuut uuuuup! I’m about to break!”

Heads pop up above desk dividers for a better look, like meerkats, and still they’re none the wiser. Simples, I tell them, it’s a prospective client being humoured by the sales team in the breakout area.

Ah yes, the breakout area: the one blot in the middle of my green and pleasant open-plan landscape.

Back at the turn of the century, every open-plan office would benefit from the common-sense addition of one or more general-use private rooms in which ad hoc meetings could be held, projects discussed and deals struck.

Associated with every such meeting room would be two unfortunate souls. One was the steely PA on the sixth floor who’d been told to manage room bookings against her will and could break your legs with a caustic stare. The other was the poor sod whose desk was nearest to the meeting room door and found him or herself forced to respond to queries about its current availability from tentative visitors every 15 fucking seconds throughout the day.