When I come to the Office I enter into a state of working. Outside of the Office there is a state of non-working. The boundary between non-working and working is culturally essential but highly permeable. There are many histories of Offices and television shows about Offices.
Sometimes the state of Office Work is communicative, meaning that I talk to strangers or on social media, and do things not actually focused on Deliverables [future post]. In the last decade “work” is sometimes not about doing things but rather about maintaining a certain mood for spans of time while people complain to you. Sometimes this is called management.
Sometimes Offices have profound Hierarchies [future post]. They are places where human order is expressed. There was a boss we did not like who sat in a corner. She had slick hair and when she heard noises she would pop up above her monitor and peer at us. We called her the Otter. We joked about throwing her fish. None of us knew for sure that otters ate fish, because the Internet didn’t really exist then, except as the Internet. No one could tell you that the sea otter’s diet consists almost exclusively of marine invertebrates, including sea urchins, a variety of bivalves such as clams and mussels, abalone, other mollusks,crustaceans, and snails. Its prey ranges in size from tiny limpets and crabs to giant octopuses. No one even wanted to tell you that.
When I was young, in high school and college, Offices were a mystery. My father shared an Office with another English professor. My mother had no office but had workstations, cubicles. But the offices of work, the seas of cubicles, the hierarchies of desk, cube, inner office, outer office, window office, corner office, main office—I imagined that most work looked like the movie Brazil.
When I was in my 20s I had a desk at a Company [future post] uptown. That company got bought and I got a more official cubicle downtown. I put up various pictures of medical experiments on monkeys on my cubicle wall because, we were actually building web pages for cultural and business organizations, it felt like we were doing medical experiments on monkeys.
When I worked at some Offices I had a desk, but sometimes not. Sometimes I just had a laptop. When I worked at a Magazine [future post] I had a cubicle, then a dark, hot, office, then the nicest office so far: All glass with a view of downtown. It was beautiful on winter days to look out and see so much of Manhattan [future post] covered with snow. I built a large Ikea bookshelf in front of the door so that no one could look in. Everyone was fine with it. Walling yourself in, away from everyone else, with hundreds of books, was completely acceptable behavior.
Sometimes the people I worked with in offices went on and did different things, and now they instruct people in skiing or make jewelry. It is puzzling how people can change their minds that way. I cannot imagine that change. I have been doing the same Work [future post] since I was twelve and will continue to do it until I am dead because I can never quite resolve certain Anxieties [future post]. I feel for people who do not have these anxieties, this sense of mission. And worry that they will never know true happiness. They look at me and shake their heads.
Sometimes empty space creates an Absence [future post], and I worry that I should fill that space with my presence. This has nothing to do with work, per se.
When I grew older I was given different Offices. Some for different days. At one place I have a desk I never use but I am on book leave. I am not paid nor do I pay for not using this desk. It’s actually a great relationship. I have a home Office but I am using it less and less and one day it will be a bedroom for a child. I rent an Office in a construction firm for many hundreds of dollars a month. There was a toilet in the hall but they just threw that away. Everyone speaks Russian. The WiFi is 5 up 50 down. Finally, I have an Office at a college for two days a week. There are other places where I could work, I suppose. I always thought this would be success, to have offices scattered around New York City.
