Rating My Career Through Its Office Spaces: 1962 to the Present

1962 (Winter).  Most depressing office space.  Troy Welfare Department, A tiny steel windowless office with one steel desk and one steel cabinet. It was set in the middle of a storage area that served the floor where indigent nursing home patients slowly died. I was 19 and a Bennington freshman and this was the only job I could find during our non-resident working term.  My best friend had died right before Christmas in a fire. During the next two months in that terrible space, I recorded inventory items on index cards: house dresses, bathrobes, caps, and floppy slippers.  For an hour in the morning I added those that had come in and for an hour in the evening I subtracted those that went out. At lunch I ate a sandwich in a small room a few feet from the storage area with three or four other Welfare Department workers, all older women who had worked there for centuries.  During the rest of the day, I read Kafka and Camus and considered the meaninglessness of my life, terrified both of dying and particularly of dying without losing my virginity. 

1973.  Scariest office space.  Frontlash. A small office on 19th Street and Third Ave., where I served as administrative assistant for the sour vice president of a Social Democrats (SD) front that organized voter registration drives for the unions. A single mother with my small son and daughter living in Manhattan, this was my first job after five years as an Air Force wife.  Being anti-war and ignorantly left wing, I was excited about working for a socialist organization, until I unhappily learned that, although great on civil rights and unions, SD was anti-communist to the extent that it supported the Viet Nam war.  Except for occasional volunteers and a part-time secretary, the staff consisted only of me and my boss, who ran the tiny organization as if it were US Steel.  Although only three feet away in her own office, she buzzed my intercom when she wanted to talk, usually about how to underpay the secretary or berating me for spending my free time trying to prevent the closure of my day care center.   Our office adjoined the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), another SD front, where three other women worked (I don't know what it did).  The neighborhood was shabby and little desolate, and one afternoon, with my boss gone, a young man came through the door pretending to be looking for design work.  Instead, however, he ushered me into the LID offices, where his partner was standing over its staff lying on the floor, tied and gagged. I joined them, tape across my mouth, feeling the cold tile under my cheek, repeating silently over and over as they went through our desks, collecting our meager $25 in petty cash, "Get out, get out, get out, get out." (My response to danger, I learned then, is possum-like.) I was glad my boss wasn't there.  I'm sure she would have gotten us killed.  Frontlash moved to Washington DC a few months later, leaving me unemployed. Secretary jobs were easy to get, however, and my only criterion for the next one was to have it uptown, working for a kind boss, which I did, an elderly economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where I spend a pleasant few years and helped organize a union there.

1978 - 1980:  Only time I cried over office space.  Scientific American.  Started as a secretary in 1975, when everyone in this benevolent company had their own office.  Expansion of the company forced me into the hall manning a desk outside my boss's office, feeling so degraded that I wept all day (little did I know that cubes that awaited me in my future).  Nevertheless, I typed out two novels during that period of exposure and was promoted and eventually moved back into an enclosed space.  Ended up not being so bad.

1982-1991.  Best office space. Scientific American. A corner office on Madison and 48th on the 11th floor, where I had a view of Rockefeller Center until a developer constructed a large building between us that eventually obstructed the view.   I spent the years in that splendid office, first as production manager of a very small division that produced loose-leaf medical texts, then its publisher, and finally a vice president within the company itself.  While serving as production manager, I became pregnant with Willie, my youngest son.  Instead of taking the full six-month maternity leave, I returned early and built a nest in the corner of my office, where my infant slept and whom I nursed while discussing paper and print jobs with good natured, tolerant sales reps. Promoted to publisher, I discovered the obsessive joys of working with electronic spreadsheets and entered with my wonderful crew the brave new world of electronic publishing.  Reluctantly making me a vice president of Scientific America in 1984, my new German bosses referred to my management style as Snow White and the 21 Dwarfs.  We struggled, without comprehending each other, for a few years, happily parting company in 1991.

1992-2004. Happiest office space.  Home office. A carved out corner of our apartment, where my Mac, my partner, and I built a small business over the course of ten years and I gave myself an education in web design, print-layout, and medicine. I finally was able to write mysteries that got published -- 102 cases on common diseases, which my partner sold as print and electronic patient information to medical libraries and the growing body of on-line medical sites.  Various cats sat in a basket next my computer, only occasionally stepping on the keyboard.  Michael and my older son Geoff worked a block away and would come home occasionally for lunch.  I was there every day when Willie came home from school, who commented at one point, "Mom, why don't you work in an office like other moms?" It was the best time.

2006-2008.   Most beautiful office space.  WebMD/Medscape. A large open cube protruding at the end of a row of other cubes. Back into corporate life after selling our business for shares, which subsequently tanked, I worked as an editorial director for Medscape, the professional side of WebMD, and was surprisingly content. The offices were downtown in the Meatpacking district, and the editorial group, although perched in cubes, was set apart from the rest of the company, and my cube was set apart from my colleagues.  When I swung my chair around, I looked out along a sweep of windows that provided a view of all lower Manhattan, which included a very tiny Statue of Liberty.  The drama of storms and sunsets coming across the Hudson far compensated for my small cubal area. 

2009-2013. Most absurd and worst office space. WebMD/Medscape. Total cube land, built on the hypocritical premise that it would increase communication and spur creativity, when actually it was designed, like pig farms, to save money. They had moved the editors uptown to 50^th and 8^th Avenue, where even managers were lodged in cubes, so talking spontaneously and confidentially with your boss became impossible. No privacy (phone calls heard by all, computer screen revealed to all who passed), absence exposure so lunch gobbled at ones desk between keystrokes, the only creative communication with colleagues being the occasional gophering (heads pop up above the cube wall, noises made, then shushed down by everyone on the vast floor), and continual distraction by others goffering or appearing suddenly and frighteningly behind your back wanting to communicate something. Upon standing up, the view was a despairing landscape of rectangles, beyond which windows looked out on an equally despairing landscape of corporate buildings.  Everyone wanted to work at home.  

2014. A room with a view: Art Science Code. Back to the home office, this time with windows and sporadic hours.  I'm a partner in Art Science Code, with my other two being Michael and Geoff.   Work doesn't pay much but involves this blog, my unpublished novels, Facebook time, and the occasional welcome contract from Medscape.