Office environments

At the moment, I'm writing this from the basement of a high school in Rochester, NY. I was out of work for four days before I got a call from a friend who teaches here, and he told me that the school needed a substitute textbook clerk for the rest of the year. As this is the same system where I'd been a librarian, I knew the cataloging system (as well as the librarian here), so I started right up.

The air handling units for this side of the building are in the ceiling above this room, so there's a constant rattle at about normal conversation level. It's also right next to the door to the cafeteria, so I've got the noise of students shouting, ranting, and all the other normal things that teenagers do.

However, when I get tired of being down here, I have an office up on the second floor, and there are four other book rooms I'm responsible for (though the majority of the work really needs to be done down here).

And if I think it's too much, I just have to remember that I could be back in the cube farm of collections.

The tools a collector needs are a phone, a computer, and a place to write notes and on forms. Given this, the best setup to maximize floor space and building space is cubicles.

The building itself is a pre-fab warehouse-style building - very non-descript and meant to blend in. (Though the building is sealed and the windows are bulletproof, just in case it doesn't blend in well enough.) Which means the inside has high ceilings, along with sound baffles and dampeners to keep the noise to a dull roar.

There is also background music. Usually classic or modern rock, with occasional switches to country.

The cubicle walls are greenish/grey, on which I was supposed to have tacked up various important lists and documents - fax numbers, policies, training scripts and notes, etc. In the middle of my time there, there even was a memo that came out documenting exactly how everything was supposed to be posted in the cubicle, and what lists were supposed to be where.

We were encouraged to put up pictures on the walls that weren't covered by official paper, especially anything related to our "visualization" of what we were working for. This didn't take hold so much in my area as it did in others - if you looked at other teams, you saw pictures of motorcycles, cars, boats, vacation spots, and other such things.

The computers took up the bulk of the desk, along with the phone. For ease of calling we all had headsets, and the dialler was run through the computer. The cord connecting the headset to the phone was about seven feet, so you had a bit of an ability to stand up and walk around.

Looking back after only a couple of weeks out, it does seem strange that I was essentially tethered to my desk for eight hours a day. And in the final month it was one of the things that became unbearable about the job - I got jittery if I sat down too long, and needed to move a lot. Which meant putting my dialler on pause. And dialler status statistics are viewable by management from department manager on up.

The ritual of sitting down and putting on the headset did give you a sense of grounding - a sort of tunnel vision, Matrix-style, of you, the computer, and the person you are trying to reach. Collectors who can achieve that sort of focus are praised - my manager often told me that was his mindset when he'd been a collector, as did the manager of the next team over. Not hearing everything else, just disappearing into the zone.

It sounded very much like some creative zones I'd experinced in writing, reading, and music. I did manage to find that zone a couple of times, and it scared me a bit when I did. Which is probably another reason I was not successful at the job.

The first day after I got fired, I waited until my appointed time when I would normally be plugging in to the system, and I went to sit down by the creek out behind my apartment. I listened to the rushing water, the noise of the village, and a passing train. It was a far better day.