Well, yes the time has come that I finally migrated to an open plan office late last week in a brand new 5 level building. After 16 years of having my own private office to jack off in, snort coke, watch filthy Russian porn yadda yadda yadda I am already witnessing and being pulled up on what I'm doing. The worst part is I am on a bank of 3 tables and I'm on the end where there is the walkway for all staff to walk to their desk, the foot traffic noise and stares as every single person looks at my dual screens shits me already.
The dude on my left is a programmer and holy shit, he is a lil different shall we say. Let's leave that there for now.
Then the last guy on the end is the faculties H&S advisor and already I've been told on several occasions that my desk is not set correctly , the monitors are wrong, the chair is not adjusted right....arghhhhh for fuck sake!.
People whisper, people snort, people talk to themselves,people think they are comedians, the dude who faces me has a stand up desk which he fucking constantly winds up and down through the day for no apparent reason other than to sit or stand, FFS what's it gunna be ....SIT or fucking STAND !
I have so much more to discuss but I'll save it for later..... Can anyone give me some hints, tips, help on coping in this wild strange new environment.
Thanks in advance
In my experience, open office works when there is the option to work at home. Or for people in roles that mean they spend little time at their desk.
In the last 9 years my working space has been open office, open office, private office (with the whole front wall non-frosted glass) and now at home or in an open office if I need to be in the CBD.
Safe to say, the current arrangement works best.
To your point, people are fucking weird and annoying.
At one point I had a guy behind me who has serious BO issues, chewed everything loudly and his breakfast was 7 slices of BURNT toast.
*crunch* shmack *crunch* shmack *crunch* shmack *crunch* shmack *crunch* shmack *crunch* shmack *crunch* shmack ... fucking made me want to kill myself.
I raised the BO issue a few times and his solution was to spray half a can of Lynx Africa 1m behind me. But it was not so much spraying himself, but just his general area of existence. Apparently the concepts of how to use soap and antiperspirant were lost on him.
It was a freakin nightmare.
Having my own office was fun, but at the same time after spending 8 to 9 hours in term doing nothing other than having people pop in for various BS chats, i was over it.
It seemed to be that before I had an office, if someone want to have a "meeting" with me they would have to organise a room, schedule a time and see when I was free. This meant they had to think about if their bullshit little problem was worth wasting my time on.
Once I had an office, it was like I was already IN a meeting room. So people would pop in to discuss any god damn brainfart that happened to pop into their little head. More frustratingly, 90% of the time I was telling people who were 10-15 years my senior to grow the fuck up and stop acting like children.
About 80% of that was people complaining about the environment caused by an open plan office.
"John's stuff is on my part of the desk"
"Nick spends all day with hockey games on one of his screen, wearing a lion hat and making car sounds"
"Oli is holding me accountable to the deadline I committed to and keeps coming over and checking in how I am going"
FUCK OFF!
The issue with open office is that it only works for certain roles, and certain people. For example, sales roles. Extroverts who are away from their desk 80% of the time. Then there is a bunch of people who find it disruptive but deal and finally you have introverts or people who need to work in distraction free environment living through hell.
Anyway, I forget what the point of this response was.
Something about open office environments not being all that awesome.
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