Open Offices Make You Less Open (calnewport.com) 157
Why do companies deploy open office layouts? A major justification is the idea that removing spatial boundaries between colleagues will generate increased collaboration and smarter collective intelligence. Cal Newport: As I learned in a fascinating new study, published earlier this week in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, there was good reason to believe that this might be true. As the study's authors, Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban, note" [T]he notion that propinquity, or proximity, predicts social interaction -- driving the formation of social ties and therefore information exchange and collaboration -- is one of the most robust findings in sociology."
But when researchers turned their attention to the specific impact of open offices on interaction, the results were mixed. Perhaps troubled by this inconsistency, Bernstein and Turban decided to get to the bottom of this issue. Prior studies of open offices had relied on imprecise measures such as self-reported activity logs to quantify interactions before and after a shift to an open office plan. Bernstein and Turban tried something more accurate: they had subjects wear devices around their neck that directly measured every face-to-face encounter. They also used email and IM server logs to determine exactly how much the volume of electronic interactions changed.
Here's a summary of what they found: Contrary to what's predicted by the sociological literature, the 52 participants studied spent 72% less time interacting face-to-face after the shift to an open office layout. To make these numbers concrete: In the 15 days before the office redesign, participants accumulated an average of around 5.8 hours of face-to-face interaction per person per day. After the switch to the open layout, the same participants dropped to around 1.7 hours of face-to-face interaction per day. At the same time, the shift to an open office significantly increased digital communication. After the redesign, participants sent 56% more emails (and were cc'd 41% more times), and the number of IM messages sent increased by 67%.
But when researchers turned their attention to the specific impact of open offices on interaction, the results were mixed. Perhaps troubled by this inconsistency, Bernstein and Turban decided to get to the bottom of this issue. Prior studies of open offices had relied on imprecise measures such as self-reported activity logs to quantify interactions before and after a shift to an open office plan. Bernstein and Turban tried something more accurate: they had subjects wear devices around their neck that directly measured every face-to-face encounter. They also used email and IM server logs to determine exactly how much the volume of electronic interactions changed.
Here's a summary of what they found: Contrary to what's predicted by the sociological literature, the 52 participants studied spent 72% less time interacting face-to-face after the shift to an open office layout. To make these numbers concrete: In the 15 days before the office redesign, participants accumulated an average of around 5.8 hours of face-to-face interaction per person per day. After the switch to the open layout, the same participants dropped to around 1.7 hours of face-to-face interaction per day. At the same time, the shift to an open office significantly increased digital communication. After the redesign, participants sent 56% more emails (and were cc'd 41% more times), and the number of IM messages sent increased by 67%.
No shit Sherlock (Score:5, Insightful)
Fucking duh - every conversation had in the open air adds to the background noise. Not to mention everyone else listening in.
I'm happy these guys studied this. Hopefully the MBAs that climbed up their own asses to strip away our offices will read a copy and choke on it.
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Also, crappy management has grounds to pick on people for talking and also the ability to bully someone to use the open office as a playground
Open surveillance, annoyance, and zero-trust (Score:5, Insightful)
Open office layouts make you feel like you're under the eye all the time.
Because you are.
It means that you're not trusted to manage your own time and space, that you're not worth your own space (much less a damned window), that you're subject to all manner of extraneous noise, that your security is definitely more of an issue to the point of what you are willing to leave on your desk changes...
Only fucking idiots running on ivory tower thinking and nothing else at all would want to build an open office environment.
Companies are full of those.
Sorry, my bad.
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I once asked why we are using open office when all the studies say we should not (in addition that it increases mistakes, lowers happiness it also takes as much space as office with individual rooms, because you need more meeting rooms etc). Answer was that why would all the other companies use it if it was not worth it. I could not argue with that, because if are ready to abandon science and do what everyone else are doing, it is religion, and from experience I know that debating with religious people is j
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Geeks and nerds on slashdot like privacy. Geeks and nerds on slashdot hate meetings. Not all but by far the majority.
Most other employees, the non geek and non nerds are chatter boxes, that love long waffle on sessions that they call meetings. Open plan, totally wipes on their productivity. Put slave collars around their necks to measure productivity, will not generate real or accurate results, just the kind of closed in cut of censored existence you would expect when you put slave collars on people.
When a
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I've never worked in an open office, but it sounds like a nightmare to me. The noise, the constant distractions, the complete lack of privacy. I can't imagine how anyone gets any work done at all. And that's not even to mention the security risks for anyone working with any kind of sensitive or private data, with literally everyone else in the company (and anyone even passing through) looking right over their shoulders.
I can't believe that some companies think this is actually a selling point to potential e
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No one wants an open office.
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I have an MBA and I never had a study to show any advantages of the Open Office vs Closed Offices. There are a lot of Upper Management folks without the MBA Discipline really making MBA's look bad.
From my MBA Studies what makes employees more open, isn't a physical layout, but a top down culture of openness and trust of the employees. A Culture where an employee feels empowered to walk into the CEO, or their manager, or the management in different departments, and be able to speak their concerns and idea
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Every open office layout solves one problem, and creates three more:
1) It solves the collaboration problem, you can just turn to someone and ask a question. This is very useful in most situations where work is team-oriented.
However
2) Call center, contact center and various other phone and computer-oriented tasks which require concentration are heavily degraded by the additional noise.
3) The chatterbox staff members degrade everyones performance in earshot.
Plus you have things that haven't been solved since
Re: No shit Sherlock (Score:3)
Also: open office is cheaper!
Cheaper than Microsoft Office, sure, but LibreOffice is the same price and way better.
Re: No shit Sherlock (Score:2)
That's pretty much it. It's cheaper. That's all the design consultants needed to put down. The higher ups just glossed over the rest of the "benefits". The rest of the slides were reasons for everyone else.
Our company even coupled it with work from home. Now people only come in for planned meetings, workshops, and admin required issues. No one likes to come in because there is no one here.
So we reduced a LOT of rental space, and if everyone came in... we would take up all the seats, the conference rooms, lu
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As a counter point, I know the place I work spent more on half high fancy cloth partition walls for 2 cubes than sufficient 2x4s and drywall would've cost. Re-use nice industrial steel and glass doors that they removed as part of the renovation.
Instead, we've had infighting, risks of FERPA violations, had to close off a faculty lab to move a team there, our office space for 8 cubicles has 3 people working in it, and 3 more in a former lab space that has most of their cubicles set up in it.
Since the fall ou
Re: No shit Sherlock (Score:2)
Yup.
Every VC-backed tech/surveillance company pays lip service to how much they value their employees. Then they force their employees to work on-site in an open office hellhole.
'Cuz talk is cheap, and real estate is real fucking expensive.
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I am convinced that in any office, 90% of the work is done by 10% of the people.
If so, those 10% are fucking idiots.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
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An open office doesn't even help that problem. Just because someone is staring at a screen full of code or engineering diagrams doesn't mean that they are actually being productive. Management needs to be competent enough to understand how well their employees are doing - and that requires technical expertise, and is sometimes really quite difficult.
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I also listen in on their conversations to see who's helping who. Then during individual meet-ups, I ask them for their opinion of other team members. It's pretty
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My last open office had around six teams of forty arranged in a 4 x 10 grid. If any other grid cell occupant within a 2 square distance had a conversation with one or more people it was practically impossible to get any work done. Sometimes there would be group stand-up meetings with 20+ people. Then they would just stand around and chatting for another 30 minutes. If anyone not in that group was typing, they would proceed to shout at each other. Never mind people banging their work folders on their desk, d
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Management often operates on perception.
Managers are, by and large, a waste. They certainly are when management is all they do.
No doubt you have reached this considered view after many years in management?
It's about efficiency and noise management (Score:3, Insightful)
I work in an open office. A major consideration is noise - you have lots of people in a large room,
all trying to get work done. They need some modicum of silence. IMs and e-mails are quieter than
face-to-face communication - and trying to keep things quiet is something you learn quickly.
Electronic communications also do not require that you get up from your desk and find a meeting room - that's a (small) time suck and use of a scarce resource.
There may also be an element of satisfying our need for socialization by simple proximity, reducing the need for F2F meetings whose sole (unstated) purpose is to socialize. Get what you want more quickly via IM than via (much slower) personal contact.
There may be an assumption here that more face to face interaction is good, but I think that assumption is actually false. *Some* F2F interaction is helpful either to communicate complex ideas or to develop a sense of teamwork, but *more* F2F interaction just means spending all day in meetings and accomplishing nothing.
Well duh! (Score:5, Funny)
The obvious solution is to switch to Libre Offices. ;)
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I prefer Back [wikipedia.org] type for fun. ;)
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>"The obvious solution is to switch to Libre Offices. ;)"
You beat me to it. I was going to post:
"But Libre Offices makes you more open."
Humor aside, any study will need to take into account the exact jobs being performed, because that will make a HUGE difference in productivity effects. And the individuals matter too- I am easily distracted and stressed by noise and commotion. If I were forced to work in an "open office plan" (cubicle), my productivity would tank. However, I do like being in CLOSE PR
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The obvious solution is to switch to Libre Offices. ;)
The obvious solution is to switch to Home Offices. ;)
My employer went further than Open Offices . . . we went to "Flex Offices" or "E-Places". You get a closet locker and a Rimowa Rollboy Trolley. And there is a big room with empty desks . . . with less desks than employees. Folks were expected to work at customer sites or at their home whenever possible. In the office, each morning there is a Enterprise Edition game of "Musical Chairs" (or Reise nach Jerusalem for the German-speaking folks). Since the
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Of course, sales and marketing people had private offices with overstuffed chairs, and frequently amenities like a minifridge.
And obviously sales and marketing people never have to meet external customers in their offices and make them comfortable or anything...
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I heard a story about something similar. A company had a small field office with around eight desks in a portacabin. One desk was next to the heater and coffee machine. Another few were next to windows. Everyone practically player early morning musical chairs to get that desk next to the heater. One person went as far as to make a standing order with a taxi firm to get him there by 6.30 in the morning.
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So what you're also saying is that FreeBSD is superior to OpenBSD?
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What management really wants is to have in an Office365
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Nah, go back to Microsft Office. What about Back Orfice [wikipedia.org]?
Don't be daft. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a pretext, and there is a reason. The reason is that they're cheaper.
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There is a pretext, and there is a reason. The reason is that they're cheaper.
Exactly this. Every other claimed “benefit” boils down to the bean counters attempting self-justification - they know it’s about the money, but they don’t like saying it.
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There is a pretext, and there is a reason. The reason is that they're cheaper.
Exactly this. Every other claimed “benefit” boils down to the bean counters attempting self-justification - they know it’s about the money, but they don’t like saying it.
Why would a bean counter need to justify saving money? HR or something I could understand.
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Open-plan offices were designed after World War II to eliminate any remaining cold war paranoia about spies being in the office.
Even with a closed-plan office, cheap plasterboard walls wouldn't guarantee peace and quiet. One office was so tightly packed that when your neighbour turned on his CRT monitors, your monitors would flicker as well. That led to degaussing wars between some occupants. With the cheap chipboard floors, a heavy person would make the office floor sag and you could hear them thumping by
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It's crazy. All down to availability of office space and demand. Prices in Central London are £120 square foot, while somewhere on the South Coast are only £11/square foot with a 15 minute commute and about 70 cafes all around.
Alternative (Score:2, Redundant)
Open Offices Make You Less Open
That's why I switched to Libre Offices.
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Open Offices Make You Less Open
That's why I switched to Libre Offices.
Congratulations! You are the one hundredth person to make the exact same comment in this thread!
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Open Offices Make You Less Open
That's why I switched to Libre Offices.
Congratulations! You are the one hundredth person to make the exact same comment in this thread!
Ya, but I think I made it first. So there's that! :-)
[ I am soooo bored. ]
School cafeteria (Score:2)
Concentration is important too... (Score:3)
Agreed on the distractions.
My preferred arrangement is 2-4 person spaces in which the office-mates have a shared project interest and a shared interest in concentration.
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Because too many mangers don't believe they need to do any research before making sweeping changes.
It saves money on real estate (Score:4, Interesting)
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That. The motivation is putting more people in less space. The rest is marketing spin on the idea so it doesn't look so bad.
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Of course it's a 'pure real estate play'. That's all.
I already collaborated with my team, over and around cubicle partitions. A pox on the picnic table concept.
Re: It saves money on real estate (Score:1)
Yeah, its so much better living in a country where victims of terrorist bombings at marathons end up bankrupt from the medical bills.
Fucking primitives.
And maybe their measurements are screwed (Score:2)
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Maybe. But if you are interested in developing paper darts, they definitely go back and forth better - as does gossip.
Productivity be damned: if the boss thinks you are working, that is good enough for him. If you are required to think, forget it!
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I do not mean to suggest that yelling back and forth is good for productivity. (I don't think it is, in the long term.) I just mean that their measurement thingy (worn around the neck to detect face-to-face interaction) would probably not count any yelling back and forth that happened. "Yelling back and forth" is communication, so they would probably not have measured that form of communication. However, it's also disruptive to everyone nearby. Personally I would not prefer an o
Here is the kind of office I'd like to work in (Score:1)
This [joelonsoftware.com] is an office I'd like to work in, from a company owner who gets it. I'm sure the amount he put into getting this office has more than paid out in increased productivity.
Too bad other companies won't read anything other than the 4-color glossies from the Gartner Report, peddling the "synergy" produced from a open office [google.com].
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What, no computer?
Ok, who left the door open and let the middle manager in? I clearly said to shut the door to keep the vermin out!
It's rude to talk in an open office (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this obvious? Anyone talking to someone face-to-face in an open office is being rude to everyone in the room. So no longer do you pop into someone's office and chat, but are instead formed to setup a meeting or distract a dozen other people.
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In that case the study of the same group in two different environments shouldn't have had such a dramatic change in face-to-face and digital communications.
Why do companies deploy open offices? (Score:5, Insightful)
.
With open offices, you don't even have the sound-absorbing walls of a cubicle to help reduce the noise of co-workers, so everyone tends to wear [noise-cancelling] headphones, isolating themselves from their co-workers.
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This is both logically and historically false. Traditional work places included large open rooms, group offices, and individual offices. Cubicles were introduced in the 1970s as a cheap replacement for individual offices, to give the cubicle dwellers the illusion of privacy.
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Companies don't.
Bad managers do. (The fact they have no purpose might become obvious).
My company change 2 years ago and embraced modern working fully and told all the managers if they refused a home working request it better have a damn good reason. They resisted at first but were trained up. I'm sure the bad ones moved elsewhere.
But you probably live in the land of bad managers ;-)
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Funny enough, it's exactly the other way around with us. Managers would love to send us home (and, if you promise not to tell the higher-ups, they let us routinely work from home as long as we can be around quickly in case one of the top echelons somehow materializes), but it's frowned upon by the top dogs.
Beats me why. I can see of course that team meetings and customer meetings you can't simply phone in, but for 99% of the rest of our work it matters little where we do it. And let's face it, hacking in yo
Open office won't work for me any many like me (Score:2)
Software engineering at the level I do it requires continuous concentration. For that I need privacy and as few distractions as possible.
Maybe there are software engineers and other creative producers who can do quality work on their laptop at Starbucks with the music and everyone shouting out orders and stuff. Not me.
I wonder how many people here remember Pirsig and his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In it he explains clearly why those motorcycle shops where they have music blasting
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Yes, you seem easily distracted.
Yes absolutely. To employ me and some unknown but substantial percentage of the population you have to provide a suitable working environment. Full stop.
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Yes, you seem easily distracted.
Yes absolutely. To employ me and some unknown but substantial percentage of the population you have to provide a suitable working environment. Full stop.
It's possible you missed his, almost certainly ironic, point. Perhaps I can clarify:
In it he explains clearly why those motorcycle shops where they have music blasting away while they are supposed to be working on the product.
One can only assume you were intending to make a point... ;-)
How much is abou status? (Score:3)
Has the office become a status symbol like the old Mahogany Row and executive restroom? Is there an active desire to put lower level workers in unpleasant conditions to make management feel better about themselves?
There are lots of reasons to think that open offices are less efficient. Often the workers are highly paid so the loss in efficiency clearly outweighs the cost of extra offices. Maybe its an incorrect money optimization but it seems obviously wrong. It doesn't take a lot of loss of efficiency in an employee who is costing $150/hour to balance the extra cost of a small office.
Another, equally damning explanation is that open offices "look" nice and modern. It seems likely that the insanely expensive Apple headquarters building (clearly not cost optimized!) is mostly open offices for improved visual appeal, with no regard to efficiency.
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I work at Apple Park. It's the worst office environment I've ever had the misfortune to have inflicted upon me. Working in that gilded shithole has me looking elsewhere for work now, and I've been at Apple for many a year.
It's form over function, it's the fact that everyone has the noise-cancelling earphones (the good Bose ones, not the crappy Beats ones) and it's the complete lack of respect that is implied. My dog has a larger kennel (not that he uses it in CA weather very much) than I have desk-space.
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Apple going with form over function even with their offices is a sure sign that they also don't give a shit about their products either. Removing usable ports and good keyboards in order to make thinner laptops is completely asinine.
Real Reason no one talks ABOUT (Score:1)
The real reasons for OPEN OFFICES ARE AS FOLLOWS
-Cheapness of outfitting the business funiture wise
-Cheapness of cleaning/maintenance
-Ease of Security/Surveillance
-VERY EASY TO RESALE PROPERTY FOR ANY OTHER BUSINESS/RELIGION/OTHER USAGE
LIQUIDITY OF ASSETS AT A DROP OF A HAT
Crowded versus spacious (Score:2)
A good reason NOT to accept a job offer (Score:2, Insightful)
Complaints about the upcoming switch (Score:1)
It's kind of bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Office workers in the 19th and most of the 20th century sat in a large room at a desk without walls. And it was managers who got their own office. If you were senior but not a manager you would share an office. Even then employees complains when coworkers chatted near their desk too frequently.
In the practical world .... (Score:3)
A major justification is the idea that removing spatial boundaries between colleagues will generate increased collaboration and smarter collective intelligence
Nonsense.
You can just pack more people in a given space and it's easier for supervisors to check if people are goofing around, sleeping on the job or just plain AWOL.
No surprise. (Score:2)
If you see everybody all the time you're more likely to immediately know when you are "missing out" and when you are not. Hence proactive social interaction isn't required as much.
Herds grazing on an open field are more chill. The noise starts when species live in environments where they usually don't see each other. Hence the noise birds or howler monkeys make in the morning.
This finding send super obvious to me.
When you can't talk to someone without... (Score:2)
disturbing others, of course you talk less.
More disturbing is that Microsoft is now remodeling buildings to make them more open. Their software is going to get even worse. I have three friends that are probably going to move to their Dublin location, and the pictures I saw of their workspace was completely open tables with no dividers. I don't know if they're going to add dividers later, but it looks bad. But at least it has an LED waterfall and a wold-class bakery.
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wold: noun:
a piece of high, open, uncultivated land or moor.
This is completely believable.
Cubes are Cheaper (Score:2)
I'm glad I have an old fashioned office with a door that closes and locks. Most of the time it's open but it's nice to know the option is there when I need it. This suits my introverted nature just fine and lets me focus and concentrate when needed. In the past I've worked in cube farms; they sucked.
Personal space is a real thing.
15 days (Score:2)
Why do companies deploy open office layouts? (Score:2)
Because its cheap.
Evaluation (Score:2)
You think management didn't know that? (Score:2)
Answer me one question: Why do managers sit in their own office instead of the open office floor when it was in any way beneficial to the one subjected to it?
My personal fix (Score:2)
for being forced into an open office environment would simply be a nice set of headphones with music to last me the entire work day.
When folks realize they can't bug me verbally with incessant questions I've answered a dozen times already ( fucking take notes already, I'm not Google ) they eventually switch over to instant messaging. I can then simply turn it off, ( which is boring ), or let an automated script take over and answer every single incoming message with " I LIKE TURTLES ".
Bottom line: You want
5.8 hours of talking per day (Score:1)
Of 8 hours work time. What was they job again? Maybe reducing all this chatter improved their productivity indeed.
Pressured Enthusiastic Collaboration (Score:2)
Yeah.. I've seen this and cringed. Manager's think they are fostering better morale and higher productivity by making employees feel pressured to act enthusiastic and highly collaborative yet they are actually just feeling as if they have to pretend... And wish it would stop.
It's also the raw, raw, raw, stand up meetings and such. I remember a meeting at Groove Shark one Friday afternoon (I didn't work there but I was there at the time). I saw the looks at the faces of those employees. They were respond
I don't get it? I would hate to work in a cubicle (Score:1)
Corollary (Score:1)
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Also, security goes out the windows. Our IT office had it's walls taken for this great open office plan, management did not give a fuck out our IT concerns and then wondered why so much IT equipment suddenly got stolen etc. Once they found we had lost $25000 worth of gear in a month, the walls soon went back up.
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An upside-down 5-gallon bucket & a clipboard. Best office I ever had, & it was portable.
From Rompco, the new, modern Porta-Botty! It's a seat! Follow the easy instructions and now it's a toilet! But wait, there's more!
Act now and we'll throw in the clipboard, free! Just add postage and handling.
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