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I worked once for a few weeks in a big, busy company, and one day I jokingly asked, “Where am I going to cry?” An hour later, I was taken aside and told me seriously about a specific stairwell. Another person there walked me for five minutes on foot through the skyscraper to a tiny, hidden conference room, then made me promise to keep the place a secret, a vow I have. tenuous. (They also cried.)
I consider them to be “paths of tears,” which are part of every office’s secret map. You can’t sob at your desk, so you have to go on a trip, smiling on the ground, until you find a place where the emotion can flow. Offices have their own mind maps. “Oh,” they say, “she’s moving to the 17th floor.” And everyone says: on the 17th floor! And you know, being a social primate, exactly where you are in the organization on this floor. Offices all have their formal and informal maps, whether inside a bank, state house, cathedral, museum, school, or business. open technology. I say “West Wing” and you know what I’m talking about.
I keep reading that the era of the office is over – that our pandemic has proven “office culture” to be an oxymoron. When the virus hit, we left our desks and threw our trips away, and now no one can slap our shoulders (or, worse yet, massage them). And aren’t we better at it? Don’t humans function better as nodes in a network than as cattle in a pen? We are finally free to access it.
But I don’t buy this. There is a book that I love Space and place, by human geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Human geography is a beautiful academic discipline in the style of the 70s, and Tuan is the sweetest. Space and place it’s only about 200 pages of thoughtful prose, but I never finished it; I read one paragraph at a time, and it fills my brain. I’ve been reading it for a decade. He writes: “The principal’s office may be just two doors down from the vice president’s office, but it will take years of hard work to get there. The office of the vice president is a time target. The goal is also a place in space, the promised land on the other side of the ocean or the mountain. And then there’s a little subway map where one train line is the time, ending with the vice, and the other is the distance, ending with the “promised land”. You have to see this. (So beautifully wide. Today everyone has to be so specific.)
I love visiting the offices, listening to their buzz. Literally: sometimes I went to a giant financial firm where they traded different types of securities on different floors, and if it was a big day in bonds, the fourth floor would be noisy, noisy; the fifth floor, however, focused on short-term investments, would be almost silent. You could hear the economy.
I appreciate the rituals of the visit. First of all, there is security: how long will I wait? Who will greet me in the lobby, should I ever have access to it – a human whose job it is to manage entrances and exits, or does each person have to greet their own visitors? Will I receive a VISITOR sticker and will the color of the sticker change overnight, for security reasons? Was the coffee brought to me or can I get it myself? Sometimes you learn that people have been having sex in a particular office, which is hard to forget. There are cardinal directions – to the elevator, to the kitchen, to the bathroom. Favored stalls. Better sinks. Adolescents small geographies shared between humans.
I have a friend who worked in the White House in a quieter time and he told me about some of his battles in the workplace. I told him one of the dumbest things I have ever said in my life: “The White House seems like a really political place to work.” I still squeak thinking about it. Yet it is a place where power is absolutely explicit and where geography means everything. And “place”, as Tuan points out, is really an indicator of time. The president can summon anyone at any time of the day, from anywhere in the country. If you work in one of the few offices in the West Wing, rather than across the alley from the massive Executive Office building, you can be in the Oval Office in a minute. It is purely a matter of time, measured by the number of steps between you and the power. Everyone knows that. The West Wing offices are absolutely rubbish. The whole place smells weird.
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