The scene would be familiar to those of us of a certain age: a gray sea of metal desks at which clerks sit from 9 to 5 clacking away at typewriters or old-fashioned adding machines, making carbon copies (remember them?) of letters or records that no one may ever look at, or recording rows of figures to be filed away.
If it were a landscape, such an office could be entitled the Sea of Futility, a place Charlie Chaplin anticipated in Modern Times back in the Depression year 1936, only without the hectic pace he was so good at transmitting on the screen.
But nothing so fast and dramatic could happen at this kind of corporate shrine to ennui. The typical office in those days was Franz Kafka without either the art or mystery. Surely it's no coincidence that Kafka's day job was that of actuary in a state bureaucracy.
To appreciate or rather apprehend the dismal quality of that kind of modern office, all it takes is a scene or two from a latter-day movie like The Apartment (1960), in which an innocent schnook--lovable Jack Lemmon--is exploited by the office jerk, played by Fred MacMurray. Every office seems to have one: the villainous climber to whom the little people out there are just furniture to rearrange from time to time.
In another but similar movie, Office Space (1999), one of the characters captures the wisp of despair that seemed to hover over such places. "We don't have a lot of time on this earth," he says. "We weren't meant to spend it this way."
Lining this Bay of Boredom in the 1960s were private offices for those slightly higher in the pecking order, The kind of offices with doors that could actually be shut--and which afforded a minimal privacy where middle managers could study their spread sheets when they weren't giving full attention to office politics. Those offices were coveted, and there's no telling how much ingenuity was wasted in conniving to get one.
All that changed, or at least took on a different configuration, as the Sixties melded into the Seventies, and Robert Propst came along to redesign the office. A talented designer with Herman Miller, the office furniture company, he called the American office of his time a wasteland that "saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort." And of Thoreau's lives of quiet desperation that he said most of us live. Robert Propst's diagnosis was all too accurate.
What to do? Mr. Propst had the answer, or thought he did. Just change the design of the office! For what are we but the products of our built environment? Change our offices, change ourselves. Make the office more human and we would all be human again. Voilà!
And so was born the concept and reality that would change the office world, and become the most dreaded word in the American lexicon, Cubicle.
That's a lot of weight for a single word, and idea, to bear. Especially when the cubicle was so simple an innovation: just a three-sided, open-ended box that was supposed to assure privacy and at the same time invite cooperation ("meaningful traffic"). What's more, the sides of the box could be moved around to fit the status of its occupant at the time, small or great, little person or big cheese, as he rose or fell in the corporate structure. For a personal touch, the only thing needed was a family photograph or two, a few unread books, and maybe a fern.
No wonder Action Office II, introduced in 1968, was born to rave reviews. Eureka! By 1985 the World Design Conference hailed the cubicle as the most successful design of the past quarter-century. By 1998, an estimated 40 million of us worker bees were busy in 42 different variations of Action Office II. I worked in one at the late once great Chicago Daily News for an excruciating year.
When interviewed for a job at Time magazine by one of its top editors in the 1960s, I couldn't help but notice that his spacious office was just a cubicle writ large. Its walls could be expanded to suit an executive's rise--or constricted as he fell in the corporate table of organization.
We spent most of the interview talking about Salinger and John Updike, who were all the rage at time. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye remains a kind of underground bible for young people who think they're the first generation to discover that their elders are a bunch of phonies.
By the time Time came through with a job offer, I was already headed back South in not so quiet desperation. It was no surprise to learn years later that the exec at Time, a nice enough fellow of no particular talent, had been squeezed out. The walls had literally closed around him. The cubicle had claimed another of its own.
As for the father of the cubicle, Robert Propst was too intelligent a designer not to recognize that his wonderful design had turned out to be not so wonderful after all.
"The dark side of this," he commented a couple of years before his death in 2000, "is that not all organizations are intelligent and progressive. Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rathole places ... I never had any illusions that this was a perfect world." Any more than his famous/infamous design was perfect.
The fault, it seems, lies not in our office design but in ourselves that we are underlings. In the end, we must rely not on our furniture but on our own code, if we still have one, to stay human. And the surest guide through the modern malaise of the office remains an old, simple one called manners.
"Be nice," as Ma used to say, "and they will be nice to you." Being an immigrant to this country, she may have had a romanticized view of America, having escaped Europe still early in its most terrible century. Yet her advice remains valid. Being nice may not change others' behavior, but it elevates one's own. Which is the important thing, for it's the one outcome we may have some control over. So love your enemies. In addition to its therapeutic benefits, it offers another great advantage: It drives 'em nuts.
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the Democrat-Gazette's editorial page. For much of the research in today's column, he is beholden to Nikil Saval, author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace.
pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com
Editorial on 06/29/2014