The Secret Life Inside Cubicles | A small sampling of the things that make office workers crazy
They may look placid enough to the untrained eye. Dressed in suits and ties, polo shirts and khakis or skirts and low heels, they roam through office hallways, drinking coffee and talking on cell phones.
But scratch the surface, and the simple office worker reveals a howling firestorm of protest.
Or at least a sizable collection of gripes.
Open The Floodgates
On a few recent afternoons, I set out to find out what parts of their jobs make the denizens of Central Massachusetts offices and cubicles cringe.
There were a few happy toilers who couldn’t think of a thing, and there were others who glanced around nervously and wouldn’t say anything even when promised anonymity. But the most common response was “how much time do you have?”
For many people, the office itself bears the brunt of their dislike. One psychiatrist who works in four different offices on different days said she hates being in a workspace without windows and doesn’t care for thin walls that let her hear conversations going on next door.
“People get pretty dynamic,” she said. A counselor complained that sharing one room, and one computer, with two coworkers made for workplace awkwardness.
Then there are the coworkers themselves. “I try to do my job, but she tries to do my job for me,” one woman who works in real estate said of a fellow employee. An employee of a state agency said the people he works with bicker over the physical climate of the office: “You can never come to that happy thermostat setting that pleases everyone.”
Another woman, who left a job in education for one in publishing, said in both jobs she found the same dynamic of meeting participants trying to make everyone laugh. “Some people treat them like community auditions,” she said. “I’m thinking, ‘boy I could be sitting in my office doing my work now.’”
Not surprisingly, plenty of venom was reserved for bosses. Two paralegals said the “egotistical lawyers” they work for fail to recognize that they can’t be working full-time on two things at once: “They all think they’re important, and their work is a priority. They want it now, but you could be working on a project for another important lawyer.”
Besides criticisms of individual bosses, there were the complaints about management promising flex time and not delivering, giving perks to favored employees while denying them to others and ignoring years of service when it’s time to hand out raises.
Among a long and varied list of other complaints were computers (“when you’re staring at the hourglass for five hours before it changes”), the lack of ventilation in bathrooms (“No office has a bathroom window that opens.”) and “supervisors who shouldn’t be supervising, general incompetence, workers who can’t shut up.” Not to mention “just too much work.”
Occasionally though, you run across a complaint that makes you wonder. One employee of a social service agency said he wishes his office was bigger. Why? “I want to go to sleep sometimes, and I can’t,” he said.
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