THE POST-PANDEMIC WORKPLACE

The kind of office you have was once a status symbol. When I began working for the American Medical Association in the early sixties, I shared a small windowless office with another editor. One day some workers came in with a bag of tools and began measuring the door. We asked what was going on, and were informed that they would be installing a coat hook. We pointed out that there were two of us, we were enduring a brutal Chicago winter, and we needed two hooks for our coats. One guy looked at us pityingly and said, “Lady, this is a one-coat-hook office! “ Oh. Subsequent experiences at the AMA confirmed that lesson.

Later in the sixties, working happily for another employer, I had a small but sufficient office to myself. The furniture was old, and my file cabinet was far down the hall, but other editors were near by for conferences and “reading back” galley proofs. I even had a window providing the natural light editors need.  That office was fine.

By the seventies, the cubicle had arrived. Mine featured all-metal furniture designed to keep me from moving and wasting any time. Files, an electric typewriter, and other equipment were compressed into a tiny claustrophobic space.  A thin metal partition separated my cubicle from another editor’s. As everything I needed for editing was in the cubicle, my only excuse for leaving was to visit the restroom, which luckily was far down the hall. Drinking a lot of water provided that excuse. After a few years in cubicles, most of us gained weight (what was then called “secretarial spread”) and were miserable. Recently I have heard with horror of “toilet cubicles” that can be inserted in cubicle-based offices. I don't even want to think about it.

Since around 1990, office workers have seen some long-overdue changes in their workplaces. Computers have made many changes possible. Telecommuting has become popular at companies where workers must drive long distances to the office. Some workers have been able to work at home, using email and other methods of communicating with fellow workers and clients. This has been an especially welcome change for those who have children or elderly parents to care for.

A home office can be essential for some. After my husband had a heart attack and my mother moved to California, I set up a very comfortable home office so that I could be a caregiver as well as a writer and editor. It was successful in many ways, but I missed the contact with others (even that spooky secretary who looked like Morticia Addams and who glided in silently once a day to drop some galleys on my desk). I no longer had easy access to training programs, just when computers began dominating the publishing world (and that’s another story). Essential as a home office was for us, not being visible in a physical office ended my original in-house career. I was able to set up my own small business, The Stone Cottage editorial service. From then on, I was self-employed and did more writing than editing.

Those who continued working in more traditional offices also have seen changes. The open office plans in many companies are planned to encourage collaboration and sharing ideas more than individual thinking and introspection. Some Silicon Valley offices have become so luxurious that workers (especially young single males) have few reasons to go home. I’ve heard of some who sleep in their offices, hit the gym and shower in the morning, then go back to work.

Currently the pandemic has changed the workplace for nearly everyone. Some are forced to work at home, whether they want to or not. They may have to use Zoom for meetings, Skype for one-to-one conferences. Many are discovering the advantages of having a home office and may never voluntarily go back to working in a traditional office.  Others are too constricted by the arrangement.

It’s impossible to predict now what offices of the future will be like, but certainly they won’t be like those of the past or present. If I were a young, single textbook editor now, with the power to design my own workplace, I’d choose to work in a home office two or three days a week, where I could concentrate without interruption. During the rest of the week I’d go to the publisher’s main office, where I could meet with authors, confer with other editors, and work with artists. Perhaps I could share office space there with an editor having another schedule, and our office would have two coat hooks. Hopefully the glass partitions, masks, and other protective equipment needed now will soon be unnecessary.

 Copyright © May 28, 2020 by Carol Leth Stone (a.k.a. RovinCrone)

SILICON VALLEY MEMORIES

Strictly by chance, in the early 1980s I was a student in Silicon Valley, but computers were far from my mind. I was a returning grad student in the Stanford University School of Education, concerned mainly with biology education and John Dewey’s philosophy. Slowly, though, I realized something important was happening right around me.

I had avoided math ever since high school, when the boys’ basketball coach was a very unhelpful math teacher to the sole girl in his solid geometry class. In the 1950s I even slipped through college without taking any math classes (which would be impossible today), and only as a returning student years later was I forced to study calculus and statistics. Even worse, as part of my grad work at Stanford I found myself doing a meta-analysis of hundreds of research papers. In those days we had to use a huge main-frame computer connected to small individual terminals. Hour after hour, I sat in the dark staring at a green and white screen filled with numbers and did my statistical work. (Fortunately, I soon discovered the original Adventure game, and spent a good part of my allotted computer time opening doors to secret passages, collecting keys, and avoiding trolls.)

A few of my classmates were buying the early PCs just appearing on the market. These early computers were connected to TV sets that served as monitors, had about 2K of memory, and could be laboriously programmed in BASIC. Deciding there was likely to be a future in these gadgets, I spent $2,000 on an Apple IIe and a dot-matrix printer. It was a fortune to me at the time, but I foolishly reasoned that it would be a good investment, because surely they would last a lifetime. Somehow I wrote a 300-page dissertation on the Apple, using the awkward WordStar program and storing each chapter on a floppy disk that was truly floppy. My faculty committee members complained bitterly about the difficulty of reading the dot-matrix printouts, but I was entranced by the ease of making revisions without having to pay a typist to retype the entire paper after each review.

Those early PCs seem primitive now. Today, for a few hundred dollars we can buy sleek laptops with gigabytes of memory, Wi-Fi, and webcams—machines beyond the wildest dreams of most people in the eighties. I have mixed feelings about computers, and have often been tempted to throw one out a window. Still, using the early PCs made it an exciting time to be at Stanford, and to glimpse the Information Age that was dawning.