Avoiding the Cube Farm - Effective Office Floor Plans? 129
scorp1us asks: "My company, after cramming 30 people into 3000sq feet, has a new lease on life in a 7700sq foot office (pun blatantly intended!). We are primarily a 3D animation/software company and we hope to avoid the cube farm design, but with a large open area in the middle, it is the default solution. We would like to know what effective strategies are used at other places that avoid the cube farm, and produce an inspiring, motivating work environment. This location has a split level and 12' ceilings, so it has a lot of potential."
idea (Score:1)
Joel Spolsky's Bionic Office (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Joel Spolsky's Bionic Office (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuide
basically most developers would be a lot happier with a private office (with a door!) than in the typical cube farm arrangement.
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Check this article for a point by point breakdown:
http://blog.sc.tri-bit.com/archives/171 [tri-bit.com]
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Oh, and while it does not look like much at all, it's actually very comfy for tech work. Not sure I'd want to code in it though...
Best advice I can give:
If you must be in cubes, so should your management. Offices are a waste of resources (IMHO) but also, what is good for the gander is good for the goose. Offices are for Legal and HR only. Liberal number of cozy conference rooms for private conversations is a g
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s/developers/employees/
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My company went ahead and partitioned our whole office with hallways, etc. Every employee has their own office, with a door that closes! Functional groups are grouped by hallway and there are conference rooms in sensible locations. Also every office has a nice big white board with plenty of markers and erasers and the conference rooms have truely huge white boards. Some of the conference rooms also have white boards that'll allow you to print what's on the board.
Plus when my co-worker wants
Joel Spolsky's Bionic Office is a Cube Farm (Score:2)
Other than the nice wiring and lounge, I'm unimpressed by this slightly modified cubicle layout. The floor plan is essentially a cube farm with 45 degree walls. That tilt wastes space in the window corner and keeps the window light from reaching the common space. The same reflections that waste window light might improve audio privacy, but that's a high price to pay for the floor space. Actual line of site privacy is provided by the partition which divides the desk in two, creating two ... cubicles.
I
Re:Joel Spolsky's Bionic Office is a Cube Farm (Score:4, Funny)
Well, they have doors. So you're basically saying if you have a private space with walls up to the ceiling, windows and doors, that's a cubicle.
English is my second language, but I would rather call it an office.
Violates Feng shui (Score:3, Insightful)
That office design violates the most important guideline [wikipedia.org] of Feng shui [wikipedia.org], which is that when sitting at the desk, you must have the doorway in clear sight. This is also a good idea because it relieves people of the nervousness of wondering who might be standing in the doorway looking in. And besides, it gives you enough time to switch back to the desktop your real work is on.
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I just close the door if I need to be undisturbed.
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"Feng Shui" actually translates as "the ancient eastern art of taking the piss out of Westerners".
$700 a month per developer? (Score:2)
You can get much cheaper office space here [wikipedia.org]. It's newer and looks better.
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Apparently they don't (know their jobs) given the way they hooked it up. In most places where conduit is required, armored cable is acceptable. Maybe New York City otherwise prohibits armored cable. But I do know places like New York City tend to change things towards the safer direction, so I very highly doubt they have deleted the NEC requirements on available current and number of disconnects.
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The six disconnect rule is for buildngs, not individual suites of offices. The rule is in place for safety, essentially
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If the wiring goes through the walls, then it is the building wiring, and is subject to the code. And the six disconnect rule will apply. This article specifically says the UPSes are in a separate server room, so how do you get the power from there to the offices? The picture shows more than six, and these are the cheap office models that can't be paralleled, so they would have to be separately switched.
Unlike an office UPS sitting there in the room, there is the expectation that the wall outlets will prov
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The six disconnect rule applies to a source of power. If you are running a generator inside the building, and it is wired such that the code comes into force, then the disconnect rule applies. It doesn't matter even if there is no wire coming in at all. This rule has been around for a long long time. I know because I've gotten a red tag from an inspector for this very reason. This is why I began to learn the electrical code so thoroughly. Remember, the code actually comes from the NFPA ... this is sub
Dilbert (Score:4, Funny)
If you do use cubicles, don't forget to extort money from people in exchange for larger ones.
optimize information flow (Score:3, Insightful)
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Actually, most of the productivity problems with cubicles have to do with noise and visual distractions.
Working in a "team cubicle" does indeed (in my experience) provide easier communication within the team but it also increase
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There Has Never Been A Study Which Indicated Cubicles Improve Productivity.
The original claim came from the advertising material for the Action Office [wikipedia.org], designed by Robert Propst. It was a completely baseless claim when the Action Office was being marketed, and after the AO was bastardised and nickle-and-dimed into the cubicles we know and... well.. know today, it was even more untrue.
Now, you may be able to improve productivity over the normal levels experienced in a cubicle, but that's a bi
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I thought managers chose cubicles because they were trying to save money. You have to wonder why that poster was claiming otherwise. Perhaps he is a manager with budget problems trying to justify himself? It is hard to justify yourself when you blow petty cash on hookers, booze and expensive restaraunts. ;-)
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When we asked "What did all this remodeling get us?" the answer was as inane as it was sad: "The building offered free remodeling, so we *had* to take it."
(Sigh...)
Development pits (Score:5, Interesting)
The openness allowed the developers to bounce ideas off each other and help each other out. Ad-hoc meetings for each team were a snap, everyone could just swivel their chairs to face the center. Meeting times were cut down to about one quarter what gathering everyone into a meeting room spends.
Depending on the personalities, you could try various sizes of pits and maybe have a few individual cubicles for those who really can't work well in open environments. But I think per-person cubicles create a lot of petty territorial issues, which was another thing avoided by the pits.
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Physical territorial issues perhaps, but I can imagine a lot of social territorial issues will quickly arise. Who's the area top dog? Who's at the bottom? Which other teams do we like. Which are we not friendly with? Who does the boss like best? Their team got a coffee machine/air condition and we didn't. Their team is using our printer out in the hall. etc, etc, etc.
Just pack them into pid
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It helps if unrelated people are sound-isolated from you, either by distance or by walls. Having too many people you can overhear is distracting, and being able to overhear people who are talking about stuff that isn't relevant is very distracting. It also helps if everybody you can hear can see you (cubes are terrible this way), because people get social cues about how many people they're distracting.
Expect people to be away
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> The openness allowed the developers to bounce ideas off each other
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With the second addition that meeting rooms and managers offices are in the middle of the room, cubicles around the outside. This way, those that are boxed in anyway, are boxed in, and the most people get the most benefit from natural light.
Also the walls are much lower than those I've seen in America - mine are at the moment approx 3 1/2' high so you get lots of natural light and don't feel like you're boxed in.
The only problem is when you have people on th
Office planning (Score:2)
Eveybody gets there own private space with natural light and non locking door.
Individual climate controls, lighting under user control.
8 power sockets, 2 ethernet, no phone. VOIP to a central phone system.
Have a standard office furniture, desk, chair, lamp etc but allow the user to take the cash value and furnish their own office if they wish.
I'd go for
Large cheap picnic table, 8' x 3' about 3' high.
Cheap set of drawers on wheels, lockable, for under desk.
Ex
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Like an IT department would allow uncontrolled computers to be plugged into their network.
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I'm confused. No phone, but they will have VoIP?
Voice over IP is merely the act of sending phone signals over an IP network.. It's an alternative to an analog signal, or a proprietary digital signal used by many (non-VoIP) PBX systems.
I suspect if anything you're suggesting a softphone, which is an IP phone (usually SIP) that runs in software on a computer. While this is doable, having a real phone (a hardware SIP or IAX2 or MGCP phone) is much nicer. It's nicer to u
Re:Office planning--Been there (Score:2)
I've worked in places that avoided the cube farm. I've worked in cube farms. I've had ocean
In all offices I've worked (Score:1)
Anywhere I've worked, the whole team can see each others faces at all times - unless we have our heads down study
Project teams (Score:2)
I really like the idea of having project teams situated near each other, with some kind of cubicle walls separating them from each other. It helps build a team spirit, and also helps keep noise down a little.
The most important thing, in my experience, is to stuff the phone-talkers into their own cubicles or offices. They have a tendency to have the phone ring when they aren't there, and also make quite a bit of noise just yammering away. Yeah, I realise this includes sales, project managers, etc.
Use decor
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I work with one guy - always on the phone and very loud. Yet when I have music going it's barely audible (can't set the volume any lower - the sound of the printer fan is louder) he'll complain. I *love* the irony. I hate hearing about his personal life, though.
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The biggest problem with headphones is that I tend to hum and sing along. It's reflexive and I don't even think about it. If I hear myself doing it, I can stop pretty easily... but with headphones on, I don't tend to notice that I'm doing it.
And I am absolutely sure the guy would find the humming much much more irritating than the music I play.
Seriously... it's tur
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Put everything on lockable casters. (Score:4, Interesting)
Subdivide the central core into 4 sectors with a tall fixed partition wall, so there's a core wall that spaces needing a solid wall (e.g. a conference room whiteboard) can abut. Put power and network jacks in this wall. Run a grid of 3/8" tension cables a few inches below the ceiling across the space on 12" centers (i.e. create a repeating 12"x12" grid of wires near the ceiling.) Space power and network drops regularly in the floor (or, if underfloor jacks are too expensive, in the ceiling.)
Allow teams and individuals to configure workspaces within that space by hanging various-height fabric curtains (weighted to the floor) from that grid with long j-hooks.
Just an idea I thought was neat - I'm sure there are problems with it, but cube walls are a bitch to move around and don't permit organic shapes or long, straight divisions with no perpendicular support. You could have individuals in C-shaped pods within an open area, or circular common workspaces with desks on the circumference, or any other configuration - and individual teams don't need someone from facilities to show up with tools to move things around, just a grasping pole to reach the j-hook (and maybe a ladder if you put your drops in the ceiling rather than the floor.)
-Isaac
Penrose Tiles? (Score:1)
Better get his permission first.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fs rchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=4133152.PN.&OS=PN/41331 52&RS=PN/4133152 [uspto.gov]
Talk to an architect. (Score:4, Informative)
A good architect is specifically skilled in making good spaces, and will be able to come up with ideas which you hadn't thought of, and will help you to make the most of the space you have to work with.
Interior Designers for Built Spaces. (Score:2)
This is a problem for an architect.
Sometimes it is and sometimes it's not. If you are building from scratch, by all means get an architect. If you are refitting an existing space you might want an Interior Designer. Architects are great for making buildings and they should be up to speed with basic layout, fire codes and all that. The devil being dealt with here is interior details.
An Interior Designer is what you really want for most office layout. Interior Design focuses on how to use interior
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any architect worth their fee will be able to do everything that you've mentioned here.
Sure they will.
Sounds like you've been reading one too many new-age-hippy interior magazines.
No, I'm married to a second generation ASID member who used to draw up office plans for Exxon, Bell South and others. If they were not making a new building, those companies turned to the local distributor and their Interior Designers.
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As an architect in training ... But "interior designer" is just a newer word for interior decorator. Basically, an architect tells them to put a couch in the lobby, and the interior designer will suggest a brand and color.
You need some more training before you make a fool of yourself when it counts. I suggest talking to SteelCase [steelcase.com], or HermanMiller [hermanmiller.com] or any other major office furniture company. Just about every Fortune 500 office is laid out by an Interior Designer working for a distributor for one of thos
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Suggestion: Office at the beach (Score:3, Funny)
The beach area can be where management works (sits) all day long
I will forward my resume immediately if this idea is implemented. I've always wanted to work in management, and based on the ability to tan all day long, I believe I will be a great asset to the company.
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Or thongs.
Not Easy (Score:2)
Problem Solved
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After spending over 7 years trying to make that happen... I failed. So I moved to country where cube farms are illegal.
Where are cube farms illegal? I'll move there too. Our company recently moved into a new building and they asked the opinion of all the staff about office design and it was unanimously decided that cubes are a bad idea. Everyone wanted their own office.
You see, you take a bunch of socially awkward, private, people like engineers and put them in a situation where they have to constant
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I'm not sure cube farms are illegal like gambeling, nudity, and playboy magazines, but I never encountered a cubicle in the Cayman Islands while I was there.
They don't have very many programmers there however.
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They don't have very many programmers there however.
They have a lot of things I like there. Grog, women, sun, sea. Cubes or offices, I don't imagine that productivity of programmers in the Caymans would be very high. That is so long as the programmers didn't all star in revenge of the nerds ;)
It's not the cubes... (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, people need personal space when they want to get focused on something and communal space when collaborating. My advice is to give people larger cubes (10x10 or 7x14) for their personal space and encourage them to customize with pictures/posters/objects as they like. This will eat up about 4000-4500 square feet including aisles and other overhead space. Take the other 3000 square feet and make some nice communal areas that people can enjoy. Why not have a "garden" where there are a lot of trees/plants and a fountain? If you don't have fish, keeping the water clear is pretty easy. (Fish die if you mess up the chemicals.) Throw in 2 or 3 cafe tables and people can eat lunch, take a break or have small meetings. It's only a few hundred square feet and it gives a completely different feel than a regular office and allows people to clear their minds. Also, if you want to divide the area into groups or sections - don't use higher walls. First, they eliminate the advantages of having the high ceilings and they are more of the same - just higher. Use greenery or glass so you don't make the space feel smaller.
I'm not sure if you have a need for large meeting rooms or not, but they should be larger than strictly needed. There is nothing worse than being stuck in a small room with too many people that slowly heats up as the meeting progresses. Also, if you have a green area, have a glass wall in the meeting room that gives a view of it. If you need privacy you can close the blinds but people generally don't like cramped spaces and if you have something nice to look at, use it.
So don't blame bad offices on the cubicles alone - if you don't use colors or variations, everything looks bad. Try visiting a university campus and seeing how the hallways in old buildings feel. Sure, everyone has their own office, but it almost feels like a cube farm - narrow halls, no natural lighting, no variation - just door, wall, door, wall, door, water fountain, wall, door, wall.... Then visit some of the newer buildings and see what you like about them. I'm guessing it will be open areas and use of windows and greenery (or windows that look over greenery.)
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Our office was recently redesigned. We have an odd shaped building, it's like an octagon with the elevators and bathrooms in the center. So the new design works well... basically the cubicles are like spokes on a wheel, coming straight out from the window. The walls between cubicles are like 4' high... the ones between spokes are 6' high. This configuration allows a lot more light to come in from the windows. Versus before where the cubes were rings, and the guys with the windows won.
They
Pre-Bubble Burst (Score:4, Funny)
Standing meetings. (Score:3, Interesting)
Stand up meetings.
Tables that stand at about 4.5 ft tall (average elbo hight for an average sized adult), that force people to stand and interact with each other. Intel uses this idea, and from what I've heard it's really effective at shortening meeting times, since it's less comfortable. And shorter meetings are a good thing.
--Jason
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My great grandfather used to have a distillery, and his workdesk was that high, and he worked standing-up. Which made sense since he had to be all over the place, he did not waste time sitting down
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4.5 feet is chin-level for me. I don't think I'd be very interactive if most of me is hiding unde
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Only if your company doesn't do anything even remotely complicated. Do you really want to stand up for a review of a 300 page document?
Too many managers think meetings are an expensive waste of ti
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Cubes CAN be a workable, cheap, design... (Score:2)
Simply put, there are good cube farms and bad cube farms. "Bad" cube farms have partition walls under 6ft, beige uphols
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I know where you're coming from with the 8 foot tall walls, (i.e. privacy, sense of personal space) but I do better with shorter walls that let me see over them.
Poster should ask their employees what they would like.
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> Cube farms have many cost and flexibility advantages that should not be
> dismissed out of hand. They can be reconfigured for less construction
> cost and disruption, are easier to wire, easier to light, easier to
> ventilate, easier to build, and much cheape
Common Space (Score:3, Informative)
This layout has at least one huge benefit - windows are common space. Sure, some people sit closer to the windows, but everyone has access to them. I often get up and just stroll over to a window and look out.
Some people might criticise this layout for privacy reasons. Frankly, what you gain is much better. Our developers work better together because it's a very grassroots team-oriented environment. We also don't have any employees whose concentration is so fragile that it is broken by a phone call being taken by a neighbour. The only people who don't sit on islands are senior management (CEO, the lone marketing guy, the secretary, etc). They sit on individual desks near each other. This helps to break up the whole "it's just a bunch of islands" that would give it a "forced team-building" feel.
Finally, we have 3 separate meeting areas. A long table near a corner used for whole-company meetings, smaller quiet meetings, or lunch. A separate room with teleconferencing for serious, noisy or brain-storming meetings. And a couple of couches near the entrance used for casual meetings where you want people to be relaxed and candid; most often used for people management or task assignments. It doubles as a place for visitors to sit if they need to wait.
PS. One of the reasons I really wanted to work at this place was the open office, huge windows and overall team/family feeling. You might find the same applies to your developers.
My Alternative (Score:1)
Low cubicle walls? (Score:2)
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I interviewed with Blue Cross / Blue Shield of North Carolina a little over a year ago... as soon as we walked into the area where the developers were working, I noticed that they had those low walled cubicles. I only stayed for the interview out of politeness. When the HR lady called to ask about scheduling a follow-up interview, I declined and told her that I could not work for a company that did not provide a suitable workspace for their employees.
Interesting Video (Score:1, Interesting)
Keep it open (Score:2)
Pick an area and stick a big wrap around couch on top of a cool area rug, some end tables with lamps and put a big plasma display in front of it all with a square coffee table in the middle... this is the conference room, hook up a laptop to the plasma and your good to go.
Make a few more smaller seating groups in other areas for team discussions. Finally estab
Give the employees power to decorate (Score:2)
Beer on tap. (Score:2)
Room to move (Score:1)
One word... (Score:1)
Don't buy dividers. (Score:2)
Hook them up to a DVR that cycles through the following:
Pleasant nature scenes.
random shots of other people's cubicles
A shot of the boss's desk.
It gives a wide open feeling, with the power of knowing where your boss is, and the random chance that others will learn you are hard at work.
These are actually good questions (Score:4, Interesting)
Although the parent posted AC, they are actually good questions. What you need is someone asking questions like this, so you/they can work out what it is that you actually need. It's called developing a brief, and if you're serious about having a fairly innovative office space then you should definitely engage an architect or space-planner with experience in "new office design", who can help with this and with the office layout. Probably the best known group in this field is DEGW - http://www.degw.com/ [degw.com]
If you decide to go it alone, then you need to think really rationally about every aspect of your company. Most people here have suggested various layouts of cubes, some of which are pretty good, but you need to go a bit further than that. The one reason that companies are getting interested in changing their workplace design is that the quality of the work place environment is very important to people - especially younger generations - and to attract and retain the best and brightest you need to have an office that appeals to them. The other reason is that you can see tangible benefits by getting staff out of the silo-metality that cubes and single offices generate, and into spaces where they can communicate with each other. This is especially important if your business depends on people working together in teams.
So looking at a really basic level, you need to work our how your business operates. If you have a number of project teams, then you need to get the people in a team together. If your teams change frequently then you might put everything on casters like one other poster suggested. What we do in our own office is have desks without any dividers which are then clustered into groups for each project team. Some outsiders don't like this - because they feel it's too noisy or open - but in reality this is not an issue. With the slight increase in ambient noise, the office doesn't feel as interrupted when a phone rings, or when someone is having a conversation. This actually helps people communicate more freely and openly! - which is a good thing for the kind of work we do. However, if your business relies on lots of individuals doing their own thing - like lawyers or researchers, then you may want a whole load of little offices. This is fine - it's just thinking about a team of 1 rather than a team of say 6. The biggest team you should consider is about 20-30. After this size people won't work together as a single unit.
After working the team structure out, all these people are going to need somewhere to meet. Meeting spaces are generally noisy, so you want to cluster them away from the general working area rather than mixing everything up. Think about arranging your office into 4 general areas - entry, noisy, workgroup, quiet. The noisy places - meeting areas, kitchens, social spaces - should go near the entry and encourage people to bump into one another. It's amazing how much sharing of ideas and information happens in these areas. You should consider social spaces and kitchens as part of the work-space, and encourage people to use them. The workgroup space is obviously where most of your desks are - arranged in teams or however. It's good to provide some really quiet spaces at the ends of the workgroup zone for people to make private calls, or sit to work on specific work without interruptions.
Ok - so much writing and I've only really begun....which is why I think you should hire an architect! But either way, good luck with your new office.
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I call bullshit. What you refer to as a "silo mentality" I refer to as "being able to work without a continuous stream of chatter, random noise, ringing phones, people talking on speakerphones, and various other interruption
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What are you talking about? My co-workers are all family men and women that just want to put in their 8 hours and go home to be their kids soccer taxi service. Why would I want to socialize with them?
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Ditto. Vast majority of my coworkers are concerned about which school is better, what's for dinner that night, getting in their excercise routine, and whatever's on prime time that night.
I'm concerned about how long it's going to take me to write that new thing in second life, or beat that video game, or takin