Finally Out in the Open

I read with great interest an article that appeared on the BBC home page this week regarding open-plan offices. If you’ve never been afflicted with one, the term refers to those arrangements without offices or even cubicles, where everyone’s desks are just sitting out in the middle of the floor. In extreme cases, people aren’t even assigned a specific desk; there’s just a communal work space, and everyone sits wherever they want to. There has been a lot of effort made in recent years to sell the open-plan office as “new” and “innovative,” as a reaction to the common “cubicle farm” arrangement, all of which ignores the fact that open-plan offices were used for decades before the cubicle became common. And, as anyone who has ever had a desk in the middle of the floor can tell you, there’s a very good reason that cubicles did become common…

As it turns out, open-plan offices are based on not one but two common fallacies. The first is simply that people who are sitting together in the shared space will spend their time talking about work-related topics. This can happen, of course, but unfortunately, people aren’t usually that disciplined. This results in a lot of extraneous conversations about whatever the employees happen to be thinking about at the moment, which both wastes time and distracts all of the people around them who are trying to work. Which brings us to the second problem: having people all around you working, talking, and making noise turns out to be really, really distracting…

Modern research on multitasking – some of which is cited in the BBC report – has revealed the very interesting fact that most of us can’t. The average person needs to focus on a single activity in order to have anything like full efficiency; splitting time between two or more activities just makes all of them take longer. This has turned into a perennial problem for college instructors, by the way, because too many of our students believe that they really can write emails, text with their friends, and surf the Internet while also paying attention to lectures. The truth is that, with very rare exceptions, anyone trying to do this will end up with memories of what they were texting about and some of the things they saw online, but not so much about the lecture they were nominally present for…

Now I don’t want to sound as if I am picking on college students in particular. On the contrary, if business leaders with years or decades on the job fall victim to the same fallacy every time they approve of things like the open-plan office concept, what can you expect from undergraduates who have been brought up to believe that they can do everything at once if they try hard enough? The real question, in my mind, is how anybody who has ever tried to get anything done in a noisy environment with multiple people talking and several different people trying to get their attention could possibly believe that having all of their employees sitting around a single table was a good idea in the first place…

Of course, it is possible that since most decisions regarding office furniture and organization are made by managers, who will generally have been given offices with real walls and doors as one of the perks of their position, that no one with the authority to reject the open-plan concept had realized how counter-productive it really was until recently. If this is the case, I think we can expect to see more and more companies going back to cubicle farms as the consequences become clear to those in charge. At least, we can all hope so, right?

Worse Than I Thought

Some years ago, when the Uber service first launched, I wrote in this space that while I couldn’t speculate on the eventual profitability of the company, the concept was something with which I personally would not want to get involved. On the passenger side, the company’s business model did not include any effective way for them to guarantee that you wouldn’t randomly get a ride from a serial killer, whereas on the driver’s side, the service seemed tailor-made for carjackers. Experience over the years since has proven my point on a number of dimensions, ranging from disputed claims of violence and abuse (from both parties) to the Uber driver who went on a shooting spree two years ago, but that hasn’t kept millions of people from driving for the company, and millions of others to paying for a ride. The company’s market value is now estimated as being in the $70 billion range, with new services being announced all the time…

Unfortunately, it would appear that working conditions for the full-time Uber drivers are actually worse than I suggested they might be. According to a story from the Bloomberg site, it has become increasingly common for drivers to work for up to eighteen hours in a day, and then sleep in their cars for a few hours before repeating the schedule. In some cases the drivers will pay for a motel room or a bunk at a hostel, but for large number of them this isn’t financially possible. It would seem that most large cities, where there is enough traffic to make driving for Uber full-time possible in the first place, the typical driver isn’t making enough to pay for living expenses. Accordingly, the drivers will live somewhere less expensive and commute to the city, where they will stay for days at a time, driving until they can’t stay awake anymore and then sleeping in their back seat…

I’d feel better about this story, and about bringing it to you in this blog, if I had more specifics about how many people are involved in the practices described, but there is no reliable information available. Since the drivers are considered independent contractors, not employees, the company knows almost nothing about them apart from their actual working hours, and since sleeping in your car in a public place is illegal in many cities, it’s unlikely that the drivers would respond to a survey even if somebody did one. The fact that there are places in several major cities where the drivers gather for mutual protection while the sleep, and that the Bloomberg reporters were able to find such locations in San Francisco, Chicago and New York (among others), suggests that there may actually be something to this story, however…

Now, I don’t mean to accuse the company of wrongdoing. Nobody forced these people to drive for Uber in the first place, much less quit their day jobs and attempt to drive full time. And as some of the drivers interviewed for the story indicated, there are people who actually enjoy this lifestyle, sleeping in their cars and all. It is possible that the classification as contractors, rather than employees, is making things worse for the drivers, and there are still allegations that the company has misrepresented the earnings potential for drivers. None of this changes my original point, however, which was that the entire experience sounds worse than any of the jobs I’ve ever had – and let’s remember that at least one previous gig of mine included cleaning the Incontinent Supplies aisle whenever the janitor called in sick…

I’ve often commented in this space that if laws are ever passed to outlaw making money off of the greedy, credulous, or stupid people in our society, the economy will probably collapse. But even assuming that’s true, it seems unfortunate to have to add the naïve, unprepared and optimistic to that list…

Killer PR Challenge

In case you missed it on your local news, there has been quite a flap for the last few days over what Sea World should do regarding its killer whales and their public image. While the company has made a very good living showcasing these majestic marine predators over the past few decades, there’s no getting away from the fact that an Orca, no matter how intelligent, fun-loving and vaguely anthropomorphic it might be, is also a six-ton (or larger) apex predator that eats smaller mammals in addition to fish. In fact, there have been some reported cases of Orcas harassing dolphins and porpoises for no apparent reason, and they are quite willing to eat adorable little marine mammals like seals, sea lions and sea otters. However, this isn’t usually much of a problem in marine parks – where the Orcas are seen frolicking with humans and eating small fish out of buckets – until one of them kills somebody, the way one did in Florida this week…

You can check out the story from the Associated Press by way of the Washington Post Online if you want to, but the basic upshot is that at the end of the lunchtime show last Wednesday, a large male killer whale named Tilikum attacked and fatally mauled one of his trainers in front of a large and horrified audience, including a fair number of families with small children. This has sent a lot of people into panic states, and the company into spin control, but no one is trying to deny that the event happened or that it would have been horrific to watch. The real question now is how can Sea World deal with the inevitable firestorm of negative comments, both from people who are against the idea of aquaria and marine parks in the first place, and also from people who are against the idea of anything unpleasant ever happening where children can see it. Or, for that matter, those against placing employees into dangerous working conditions where, for example, they might get mauled or killed by giant apex predators…

Now, I don’t want to suggest that the company has done anything wrong in this case. The trainers who work with the killer whales are all adults who have been briefed on the risks, signed all manner of legal forms, and given extensive training on how to work safely around animals that can kill you anytime they feel like it, and all of them chose to take the job. By the same token, anytime you watch a human “trainer” go into an enclosure with a wild animal (and Orcas can’t really be domesticated, after all), be it a circus lion tamer or a marine park employee, there’s a non-zero chance that he or she will be killed and/or eaten by the animal. In the case of a lion tamer’s act, that sense of danger is what makes it exciting, and in the case of a killer whale show, it’s the fact that these animals could squash the human participants like a grape – but don’t! – that makes the exhibit so fascinating and wonderful. Unfortunately, that also means that sometimes the animals will go ahead and behave like animals – in which case, you usually need to hire a new trainer…

So, if it was your company, and your trademarked tourist attraction had just killed someone in front of hundreds of horrified tourists, what would you tell the media? For that matter, what would you do with the Orca? Before you retire tonight, you might consider saying a brief word of thanks to whoever (or whatever) you believe in that you don’t have to figure out this particular PR nightmare. And, perhaps, that your job does not entail a non-zero chance of being eaten – unless it does, of course…

It Could Be Worse…

It seems appropriate that this post will run on Labor Day 2009, given the subject matter. Of course, since this is a web log and not a newspaper column, I can make anything run any day I want it to, which makes it easier for me to time this sort of thing than it would be for a real columnist. But it still seems appropriate to have a column about miserable working conditions pop onto your web browser on Labor Day, so for the next few hundred words, if you’d care to imagine me as a crabby, middle-aged man with a bad complexion and a beer gut wearing a fedora with a “Press” ID stuck in the hatband, crouching over an ancient manual typewriter and grumbling quietly as I slam out this story, please feel free. I’d still be doing better than the poor bastards who appear in the news account I’m going to hot-link in a minute…

People who believe that being a commercial pilot must be exciting, glamorous, or at least nice work if you can get it may want to skip the rest of this post and wait for the next Grad School Diaries installment on Saturday. As noted in this story from the The Associated Press quoted by SF Gate online, 62 pilots and flight engineers from a Florida-based air freight company went on strike last week protesting the fact that their employers do not provide restrooms for them onboard their aircraft. It seems that these old 727 cargo conversions had everything stripped out of the original cabin, including the lavatories, leaving the crews with nothing but plastic zip-lock bags to relieve themselves in. And you thought your office restroom stank…

Now, in fairness, relief bags of this type (usually with a small sponge in the bottom to help with containment) are commonly used by military pilots assigned to make long flights in aircraft without restrooms, but it should be noted that many military aircraft have no where to put a restroom in the first place. These old 727s originally mounted several lavatories and the support systems to operate them, and we must assume that the freight company had them removed to save on weight and space. Moreover, while military flights in single-seat or two-seat aircraft may sometimes last as long as 18 hours, very few such pilots will be subjected to regular 18-hour shifts in peacetime – a practice the striking pilots describe as the rule, rather than the exception on their jobs. They also note that after 18 hours with a crew of three and nothing but zip-lock bags for sanitation, the inside of the aircraft can get a bit unpleasant…

Why, exactly, the freight company thinks this is a good idea is not addressed by the article linked above. Certainly, every pound of equipment you can remove from the airplane means more payload you can carry and less spent on fuel, but even the military will provide pilots with a chemical-pack toilet (like the one in an RV or camper) whenever there is room to do so, and there’s no doubt that the company is not coming off very well in the press accounts of this issue. To say nothing about the striking pilots or the potential loss of business if more of their personnel join the revolt…

I point all of this out to you not, as usual, because I believe that anyone following this blog (assuming anyone follows this blog) would be daft enough to believe that their employees would be okay with 18-hour shifts every day, let alone 4-hour turn-around times between shifts or plastic bags for lavatory functions, but rather to illustrate the point that decisions that make sense on paper don’t always work well in practice. The fact is, I’ve worked 18-hour (and 20-hour and 25-hour) shifts without overtime pay, had to go back to work after only 4 or 5 hours off, and worked under conditions where a plastic bag would actually have been a step up over our sanitary facilities – and every one of those companies has been destroyed by the competition, driven out of business by employee lawsuits, bankrupted by boycotts, shut down by government regulations, or all of the above. So the next time you have a great money-saving idea, remember to think it through…

Happy Labor Day, everybody!

Stop Complaining

I can’t speak for anyone else, but personally I’ve had to cope with some relatively unpleasant working conditions in my time. I’ve worked in a retail store front in Inglewood, California that had originally been a four-room cottage – it would have been okay except for all of the random shootings in the neighborhood. I’ve worked in an office block in South Central Los Angeles – which would have been a lot better without the people actually shooting at us, but at least we had armored buildings and bullet-proof glass. I did worry when the passing gang bangers would take potshots at the six 1.2 million gallon gasoline tanks across the street, but those were armored well enough to defeat most small arms (and some anti-armor weapons, too)…

I’ve worked in offices that lost their air conditioning in the summer; I’ve worked in a windowless office so dark I was considering getting some toy bats to hang from the ceiling; I’ve worked retail in South Central, where you don’t have a nice armored bunker to hide inside (which is why I found the Unocal gig so easy to take); I’ve worked in converted military barracks in the process of being eaten by termites, and I’ve worked in food service under conditions best left undescribed. But even I can’t top the people in this next story…

A story being reported this week on UPI online tells the unusual story of a guy whose office is actually a converted elevator shaft, abandoned when his employer ran out of funds to install additional elevators and later converted to storage space and then to office space. He says the complete lack of ventilation is a drag, since he has to keep his door open at all times or suffocate, but it’s still a step up on the guy whose office is a converted restroom, complete with two urinals on one wall. They both envy the guy who got the office converted from an old bomb shelter, but at least they aren’t stuck in a cubicle farm. What makes this story so unusual is that all of these people are, in fact, Federal employees, and the building they work in is the U.S. Capital…

Which means, I suppose, that the accommodations may not be first class, but you can’t beat the location, especially if you work in Congress, which all of them do. Still, the next time you’re feeling bad about your windowless cubbyhole or fabric-covered box, cheer up. At least you’re not getting The Shaft…