The Open Plan Office: a.k.a the Scourge of Shytroverts Everywhere

Are you unfortunate enough to work in one of these arrangements?  No office, no cubicles, elbow to elbow with your coworkers and privacy be damned?  If this sounds like a nightmare to you, you’re not alone.  Increasingly workplaces are adopting this model, no doubt dreamed up by some extrovert, supposedly to foster “collaboration.”

Unfortunately for the architects of this workaday utopian concept, it is backfiring badly.  Apparently even some extroverts and “ambiverts” find open space offices to be an odious intrusion upon their workaday lives.  Extroverts need quiet in which to work and concentrate too. 

Familiarity guaranteed to foment contempt

Besides, if I’m not mistaken, people have been managing to collaborate for years despite the cubicle farms – it's f***g work, they have to.  Anyway, it’s not like a flimsy cubicle wall is going to stop that or any person from talking loud enough to solicit an opinion over that cube’s wall or otherwise be a pain in their colleague's a** as any gainfully employed person can attest. 

News flash: people have legs -- or, if disabled -- wheels to venture outside of their partially-enclosed cubicle and collaborate away.  I honestly don’t think there has ever been a lack of that.  Ever.

If you ask me, this whole movement toward open offices probably has a monetary driver.  Companies are probably too cheap to install the cubicles, and instead of admitting that, they are instead selling the idea as “collaboration.”  Undoubtedly, one big contiguous desk probably costs much less than installing a cubicle farm.  A sad fact for the introverted among us and increasingly the extroverted.  However, seeing that in life the loud squeaky wheels get the oil, maybe for once what workers want and need will trump money, and employers will move away from the bullsh** that is the open plan office.