Up two escalators made by Schindler, polished stainless steel with dark gritty grooves running along each step vertical to my feet. The cafe expanse of the cloistered cafe rolls out before me, Roman white columns slice into the tiles below, littered with flowered decals and topped with crudely-shapen leaves which curl to meet the soiled off-white ceiling above. An intrusive light brown air duct intersects the common eating area above, drawing air from the roof or one of the other four floors and disperses it evenly over the patrons below. A multiplicity of forest green signs lead from escalator to the entrance to the cafe: “No outside food or beverages. Barnes and Noble café tables are reserved for our café customers only. Additional seating located on the 4th floor,” “Café tables are for our cafe customers. Please enjoy the seating in other parts of the store,” ” and then again inside the cordoned-off cafe area: “This area of our café is reserved for café customers only. Thank you.” Emphasis is placed on the igrec above the “e”: café not cafe. It is a place of prestige, a place of privilege. More than anything, it is a place of business.
The lights above, shaped like ill-informed, halved gel capsules shoot down countenanced rays of bitter halogen light. The tiles below my feet white and black, framed with dark black grout, bespeak of a corporation cognizant of the fact that although a bookstore, tiles are easier to clean, black grout easier to hide the dirt and grime collected over years of patterned trapsings by bookstore patrons. On the walls, cardboard posters of “great” novels: The Natural by Bernard Malamud, Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck, Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell Jr., The Great Gadsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. They look cheap, stand askew on the wallpapered walls: large forest green stripes interspersed with light teal and dark gray stripes, the bottom covered in a dark wood siding grooved with gold bands at the top. This is a mass-produced cafe occupying a chain bookstore. As with any successful corporations, its surroundings are not left to chance. Each color, each poster, each seat cushion and tabletop has been chosen unquestionably from a set of pre-made choices that would fit the corporate image, the “feel” of the store. High along the walls, ironic billboards of written masters stand plastered to the wall with cheap poster glue and thin poster paper cut into even, manageable sections for those that rolled them on. Singer, Kafka, Neruda, Tagore, James, Wilde, Twain, Shaw, Hardy, Dickenson: all are depicted striking intellectual poses, distant gazes peering over the endless swarms of people moving in and out of their presence. The irony abounds from the simple fact that this place is far from an intellectual hub of cultural activity. It is a corporation donning the wigs of writing masters to sell a product, further an image. I turn to the right, see Nabakov, Joyce and Shelley plastered in a hidden recess to the dirty wall. Shelley has a “First Aid for Choking” sign on her breasts and is side-lit by a neon red “Exit” sign on her right, luminescent against the bright white door. I have had enough and I turn to walk away. A sign greets me as I exit and step on to the escalator: “Treat yourself. Enjoy Starbucks.” I am gone.
“1968 and Max De Pree, then CEO of Herman Miller Inc., and Robert Propst, a successful and young designer at the time, create, market and sell a piece of furniture that would forever change the face of the workplace: the reviled cubicle. Faced with the failed transplants of the open, bullpen style offices of newspapers to other facets of corporate life, Propst created a box he called the “Action Office” whose initial underpinnings were primarily moral in nature. Propst wanted to open up conversation, create a free, egalitarian flow of information and battle the staunch bureaucracies, the immovable hierarchies, the solid walls of offices. The cubicle was his solution: movable walls, no roof to allow for easily passed information, an open-air feeling to increase the well-being of its occupants, and the easy to use walls where one could pin up any information they were currently working on. Economics didn’t enter into Propst’s mind at the time, perhaps his biggest mistake.”
Ned pauses, scans the classroom of well-groomed school children sitting with near-perfect posture in Herman Miller Inc. school desks. They are in their twenties but might as well be in their 50′s. He imagines them all in suits and ties, skirts and blouses, high heel shoes, wingtips well-polished. They are sitting in Herman Miller Inc. cubicles, typing away at their computers while encased in a pristine, well-designed and tightly-managed piece of “systems furniture”. Florescent lighting overhead pulls the blemishes on their faces to the fore, makes everyone slightly unsure of themselves, as if in a nightmare, they have been transported back in time to middle school where Tom Turner is referred to as “pimply-ass Tom” or Betsy Buranco is nicknamed the “Bumpy Bronco”. They will leave their cubes only occasionally, look over their five foot walls before exiting, ducking wildly if a co-worker happens to be walking their way. Conversing will become painful, an activity to be avoided at all costs. Coffee-runs become a steady jog, bathroom breaks become power-walking exercises, time outside the cube is limited for fear of having to interact.
“So, once corporations started to run the numbers, it was more economical for them to rid of the extra-large offices and cram as many employees into cubes as possible and people bought it. At first, people really seemed to be sold on this idea of an open office, talking to co-workers, reaching over to grab paperwork, yelling over rows of cubes to get the next estimate on the cost of Project X. But it didn’t take people long to realize that they missed the privacy and it was not uncommon for individuals to raid storage closets for pieces of cardboard, plastic, anything that they could either place over the roof of their cube or fill in the gap where a door used to be. People began to hate the cube and it hated them right back, slowly eating away at their sense of self, alienating them from an already alienating job where no one really knew why they were there or how their superiors made fistfuls of money.”
A few of the girls sweep their hair to the side at the sound of money. The boys lean in as if he is about to share the secret of how, in fact, these top brass folks make their money but he is at just as much a loss as they are. He imagines all of them doing synchronized stapling along the long isle-ways of identical cubes. Some will personalize their cubes with family photos, little cartoons, a few awards, maybe a plant or two if the management will allow. Many will not though and the cube will be treated as a coffin of sorts, a black hole where the soul goes to rest, to rarely return. He imagines looking over the sea of gray cubes, seeing only the tips of their bobbing heads as spreadsheets are filled, papers are filed, phone calls are made and answered. Their misery would be his creation this time, a new and revitalized sense of depression-inducing furniture.
“But I come to you with an answer to the cube: the octagon. In a new feat of office engineering, I have made for you, the future workers of this great country, a sensational apparatus I like to call “Blocta”, the blue octagon. Not four but eight sides will now compose your charming new home away from home in a light blue color adorned with puffy white clouds painted on by our well-calibrated machines at Herman Miller Inc. Four drawers under your desk, one on each wall, leaving you with more space than ever to store all of those things that you are going to want to bring to your scintillating new workspace. Added to this, imagine you could close yourself off from other co-workers when handling sensitive materials. With Blocta it’s never been easier. Simply close your eighth wall and a sensor automatically turns on the camera stationed above your cube so that your manager can watch from their corner offices far down the hall. Privacy, comfort, and color. Blocta will change the way you do business and all this can be yours once you graduate and come work for us!”
He raises his voice at the end of his sentence to the feeble clapping of one red-haired girl in the corner. Noticing she is the only one, she quickly stops herself and blushes.
“I am done presenting now. Thank you.”
He says it slowly, methodically. When he is done, all of the students stand up in unison and clap wildly. He has been a great success. The company will retain 95% of these children upon their graduation. The other 5% will go to prison for challenging the status quo. Business will continue to be good.
