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#Post#: 28796--------------------------------------------------
Re: Cubes Open Office land - what breaches of etiquette have you
seen?
By: NewHomeowner Date: April 2, 2019, 7:28 am
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All you folks make me so very appreciative of my own office,
where everybody around me is quiet, pleasant, and thoughtful.
Which makes me think.....if they are all the good guys, maybe
*I'm* the one who is objectionable?? Eek.
#Post#: 28849--------------------------------------------------
Re: Cubes Open Office land - what breaches of etiquette have you
seen?
By: Raintree Date: April 3, 2019, 1:58 am
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These are hilarious, and make me feel better somehow. I am
around the corner from this one woman with a loud, harsh voice.
She is always talking - ALWAYS. Which is part of her job as she
is the one greeting incoming clients. But when she wants to ask
me something, she calls out to me from where I can't see her -
behind the wall. Since shouting is her normal speaking voice,
and I tune her out most of the time trying to do my work, I
usually have no idea that she is attempting to talk to me.
Especially irritating was when I had a family member (FM) who
was ill, every single day she'd call out through the wall,
"How's your FM??" and didn't pick up on my monosyllabic answers
(because she had never met this person and I'd already spent my
off time running around dealing with the ill FM and didn't feel
like explaining every new development the minute I got to work).
Lots of followup questions: "Are the doctors going to do this?
What about that?"
If you do engage her in conversation, she will go off on a long
rant about something and it echos through the entire office.
I read somewhere that open offices and cubicles were supposed to
keep employees connected, but that the loss of privacy has
resulted in employees resorting to all kinds of measures to
preserve their personal space, such as headphones.
#Post#: 28855--------------------------------------------------
Re: Cubes Open Office land - what breaches of etiquette have you
seen?
By: Aleko Date: April 3, 2019, 4:15 am
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[quote]I read somewhere that open offices and cubicles were
supposed to keep employees connected, but that the loss of
privacy has resulted in employees resorting to all kinds of
measures to preserve their personal space, such as
headphones.[/quote]
Absolutely. My organisation's building gradually had almost all
its divisions ripped out, largely because due to financial
cutbacks and reorganisations more and more people were being
packed in, and my team ended up in one room with serried ranks
of desks. We all did a lot of phone work, and even if we all
tried to keep noise to a minimum it was sometimes just
impossible to hear the caller. We asked if we could at least
have baffle-boards between each two rows of desks butted up
against each other, and were told 'heavens, no! That would
separate people and reduce team cohesion!'
#Post#: 28862--------------------------------------------------
Re: Cubes Open Office land - what breaches of etiquette have you
seen?
By: Rose Red Date: April 3, 2019, 7:16 am
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[quote author=Raintree link=topic=656.msg28849#msg28849
date=1554274710]
I read somewhere that open offices and cubicles were supposed to
keep employees connected, but that the loss of privacy has
resulted in employees resorting to all kinds of measures to
preserve their personal space, such as headphones.
[/quote]
In open offices, it also also feel *more* exclusionary when
watching one department have a party. Or if someone gets
applause from their department and others don't know why.
#Post#: 28865--------------------------------------------------
Re: Cubes Open Office land - what breaches of etiquette have you
seen?
By: Venus193 Date: April 3, 2019, 8:11 am
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Open plan offices are about reducing costs. Two of my companies
had cubicle stalls, which felt like shower stalls because they
had sliding doors that were translucent. Fortunately, the walls
were about seven feet high but since they were open at the top
it didn't cut back much on sound from outside the cubicle.
My last company had a totally open desk arrangement and that was
hell. No privacy and if you needed to have a conference call
and the two meeting rooms were both in use you had to deal with
it. What was worse was that there were no carpets and no drapes
on windows (which was usual) so nothing to absorb unnecessary
sound. This made it all the worse on the one day a week that
the head of HR had her 3-year-old in the office in the
afternoon. The child ran around and climbed on any vacant
chairs in the work space. Nobody had the guts to say anything
about it.
When I go into Conspiracy Theorist Mode I wonder whether this
kind of office arrangement is to tell employees that they are
really unimportant cogs in a machine.
#Post#: 29069--------------------------------------------------
Re: Cubes Open Office land - what breaches of etiquette have you
seen?
By: frog24 Date: April 8, 2019, 12:35 pm
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This isn't nearly as bad as some of the others, but...
I used to work in government, and had a co-worker who [s]thought
he[/s] knew all the answers to everything. The work was beneath
him, the people were beneath him, but he wasn't going anywhere
because, hey, a 7 hr work day and a pension. (All the things
that give government workers a bad name)
So it was around the December holiday season, and while there
was work to be done, none of it was extremely pressing. We sat
sort of back-to-back in our group of desks and I could hear him
typing. He was typing a lot, non-stop, for quite a while by the
time I really started noticing it. That was rather unusual
because normally he spent a fair amount of time surfing the web,
or "researching" his assignments.
So I half turned in my desk and saw a word document with a page
completely full of text!
Later that afternoon, I had cause to ask him a question about
something and he didn't quite hide the word doc window to answer
my question. The title of the doc was simply his name, and it
was a novel. The part of the page I could read was rather
steamy... Whenever I noticed he was typing for extended periods
of time, I knew he was working on the book.
#Post#: 29220--------------------------------------------------
Re: Cubes Open Office land - what breaches of etiquette have you
seen?
By: Codewoman Date: April 11, 2019, 3:43 pm
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[quote author=Rose Red link=topic=656.msg28862#msg28862
date=1554293796]
[quote author=Raintree link=topic=656.msg28849#msg28849
date=1554274710]
I read somewhere that open offices and cubicles were supposed to
keep employees connected, but that the loss of privacy has
resulted in employees resorting to all kinds of measures to
preserve their personal space, such as headphones.
[/quote]
In open offices, it also also feel *more* exclusionary when
watching one department have a party. Or if someone gets
applause from their department and others don't know why.
[/quote]
In my office, we've taken to singing or clapping along when a
near-by department is doing the same. They don't really notice,
but we have a nice little laugh at ourselves.
#Post#: 29238--------------------------------------------------
Re: Cubes Open Office land - what breaches of etiquette have you
seen?
By: Aleko Date: April 12, 2019, 2:06 am
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote]In open offices, it also also feel *more* exclusionary
when other departments have a party.[/quote]
Which is why many organisations, having insisted on stripping
out all the partitions to create one space for all their
departments, don't allow any of them to have a party at all. So
much for creating team spirit!
My own department was much smaller than any of the other
divisions of our organisation, being a specialist outfit. We
occupied an enclave at the end of one floor, which for
structural reasons couldn't be opened up and made part of the
big open-plan space, so we were able to have parties for
birthdays, leaving dos and any time we won an award or passed a
milestone. A team email would go round: "3.30 Wednesday,
Ashley's birthday cake". Then we were attached - for purely
administrative purposes, it made no difference to how we worked
or who we worked with - to the big department one floor above,
and word came down that it would be ill-thought-of if we held
parties and didn't include "all our colleagues" in the
invitation. I mean, wot? "Colleagues"? We didn't know the faces
of half these people, let alone their names, nor they ours; and
I doubt if all of them could have found our office even if they
wanted to. We got round it easily enough by just giving the
heads-up by word of mouth; but really, it was idiotic.
#Post#: 29873--------------------------------------------------
Re: Cubes Open Office land - what breaches of etiquette have you
seen?
By: Songbird Date: April 25, 2019, 10:12 am
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Ugh.
We have an open floor plan with work stations instead of
cubicles.
I came back from the ladies room to find the guy whose desk
abuts mine having another long, loud, personal conversation with
a coworker. She was standing next to my workstation, and the
file she had been carrying is now sitting on my desk.
The file is sitting between my computer monitors and the wall,
so it’s not in my way.
But it is irritating. A violation of my personal space.
#Post#: 29874--------------------------------------------------
Re: Cubes Open Office land - what breaches of etiquette have you
seen?
By: Hanna Date: April 25, 2019, 10:17 am
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I heard someone clipping nails the other day and ran out to see
who, thinking it was coming from the cubicles.
Alas, it was coming from my own Director's office. ;D
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