The future of work is weird.
I did not like working from home for the last 18 months. To those of us who believe that “work” is a geographic place rather than a mere state of mind, the very idea of “work from home” makes about as much sense as “airport from school” or “hospital from river.” I am happy, of course, to work from home as a temporary matter to prevent the spread of respiratory disease, but I do not wish to make a habit of it under less dire circumstances.
I have always found comfort in the office as a place where things are out of my control so that I might complain about them. The lighting is bad. The temperature is not right. The bathroom soap smells wrong. People are bad with elevator etiquette. Working from home has meant that my complaints are almost entirely about circumstances that are well within my control: there are too many dirty dishes, the temperature is not right and the management (i.e. me) is too stingy to crank the air conditioner, and the food available on-site is terrible. Complaining is significantly less pleasurable when the source of my complaint is my own shortcoming.
Following the rest of the country into a false sense of public health optimism, I was recently delighted to return to the office. I was returning, of course, only to the concept of the office. In a new job, I have started working in an entirely new office. I am the lone member of my company that routinely works there, and I share it with other young professionals (if people in t-shirts can rightly be called such a thing) whose employers have given them shared office subscriptions that they, too, might experience what the owner of the space calls “the future of work.”
As somebody with significant experience in the public sector for my age, I feel that I am uniquely qualified to comment on the past of work, which I rather liked. The past of work involved my having a cubicle, a desk telephone, a swivel chair, a thermostat of dubious reliability, and a desk with a keyboard and mouse selected by somebody in a far-off procurement department. In the past of work, the walls were beige and people made little jokes about their caffeine addictions.
The future of work is very different. The future of work, for me, takes place in a building in Lower Manhattan which was once the home of a company (or, at the time, the company) that manufactured American telephones for much of the twentieth century. The company has since moved its business model to electron tubes and its headquarters to suburban Chattanooga. There are no longer traditional telephones in the building because the future of work is very concerned with being mobile.
Because the future of work is so concerned with being mobile, people in the future of work do not have desks. If they had desks, they would not be mobile and then it would not be the future of work. In the future of work, people sit at long tables and take all of their worldly belongings to lunch with them.
The future of work is designed for “collaboration,” a term that I swore off in college. (“You know who collaborates? The Nazis! That’s who collaborates!” a professor had insisted in class, thinking of the term strictly in its French connotation.) Real estate developers were no doubt pleased to learn that designing for “collaboration” and designing to reduce the cost of cubicles and other office furnishings often go hand in hand. In practice, collaboration typically involves overhearing Danish businessmen talking about sales figures nearby, a field in which I have very little to offer.
The future of work looks like a Californian embassy if California had embassies. The future of work is meant to be fun, which means that considerable effort has gone into stripping the building of its mid-century trappings and replacing them with bright wallpaper and soft furniture with inadequate lumbar support.
The future of work is so fun that there are beer taps in the common area. They now dispense fizzy lime water because the future of work still involves proving to shareholders that you are not throwing away money on beer. If I had a choice between beer and cubicles, I would have chosen cubicles. Now there is neither beer nor cubicles. There is only fun wallpaper and the vague concept of collaboration — and, finally, the glorious pleasure of having something to kvetch about outside of my living room.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
“Invasion of the Robot Umpires” by Zach Helfand in the New Yorker.
My thoughts on most sports are well documented and generally unfavorable. Baseball is different. It is different from soccer in that it is interesting to watch and sounds nice on the radio. It is different from football in that I understand what is going on and how a person might score a point. It is, I am sure, different from other sports, but I cannot think of other sports off the top of my head and do not particularly care to.
I am not a prolific baseball fan in the way that season ticket holders or people who pay extra for cable television are, but I appreciate it. I feel the same warmth toward baseball that increasingly secular Europeans feel about the church: they may not be deeply involved themselves, but they appreciate that it is a national good and an important part of their collective identity.
I feel, then, a defensive instinct when people start to talk about changing things around and adding computerized umpires.
In one way, this is a story about the changing face of the national pastime. In another way, this is yet another example of our tendency to computerize everything so that we might someday achieve our goal of living inside the gray world of an economics textbook, drained of all humanity.
“The Real Reason McDonald’s Are Always Broken” on YouTube.
There is, at the end of my block, a McDonald’s. I do not make a habit of going there — I prefer to support my local bodega for my greasy food needs — but sometimes a person needs soft serve ice cream to survive, and McDonald’s provides. Sometimes.
The first time I was wronged by a broken ice cream machine at a McDonald’s was years ago at the end of a two-week trek through the Adirondacks. Each day, as our food supplies dwindled to a sad bag of lentils, I would wake up and go to sleep dreaming of a simple McFlurry. On the way home, just off the New York Thruway, I nearly had the object of my desire. Nearly. “The ice cream machine,” they said, “is broken.”
This scenario has since played itself out perhaps half a dozen times as I have tried to get ice cream at the end of my block. It is a crushing blow each time.
As I write this, 11.87% of McDonald’s ice cream machines in the United States and Canada are broken. In New York, the figure is a whopping 30.61%. Something nefarious is afoot.
This month, the Federal Trade Commission got involved. They insist that they are merely looking into the matter but, if this video is on the right track, they will uncover terrible truths.