Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  Chiat/Day cleared out of its offices in September 1998 and moved into a different space. Two years later, the Nasdaq crashed, and the dot-commers began vanishing one after the other. There was little money left to be spent on fancy offices, and it seemed that the heady experiment of the 1990s was over and the office of the future was dead.

  9

  THE OFFICE AND ITS ENDS

  The office could be any office. Cove fluorescents on a dimmer, modular shelving, the desk practically an abstraction. The whisper of sourceless ventilation. You are a trained observer and there is nothing to observe.

  —DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, The Pale King1

  After the stock market crash, which emptied out the lofts and warehouses of San Francisco, eroding in an instant the frictionless, cloud-kicking fantasies of the dot-commers, another white-collar recession slung into place, and the office seemed to resume its role as the workplace everyone loved to hate.

  Few cultural objects expressed this miasma of ill will better than the film Office Space, which appeared in 1999 at the very peak of the boom. Its theatrical run was a modest failure, but in retrospect it’s no surprise that a film so relentlessly dark and nasty would be overpowered by the delirium that gripped the end of the millennium. (From a reporter visiting a Microsoft annual meeting in 1997: “ ‘Why are we at Microsoft?’ bellowed billionaire Steve Ballmer, then the company’s executive vice president, to a crowd of nine thousand employees packed into the Kingdome, Seattle’s indoor stadium. ‘For the money!’ he screamed. ‘Show me the money!’ The crowd responded with a roar: ‘Show me the money!’ ”)2 Running gags about staplers, misplaced memos, “Hawaiian Shirt Day,” and the specter of working lives wasted in dead-end, purposeless jobs for a gray tech company: no one appeared ready for that sort of humor in an era of raging exuberance—and anyway, the cubicle was dead, right? Then the bubble burst; people woke up the following morning with their stock options erased; the beanbag chairs were gone, and they were in a cubicle again or unemployed and desperately searching for a cubicle. Office Space found new life on the small screen, a medium that suited the office worker existence depicted in the film: long days huddled in front of a computer, followed by short nights exhausted on the couch, staring at a television. In 1999 it barely recovered its $10 million budget in box office receipts; by 2003, it had become a cult classic, with more than two and a half million copies sold on video. (It screens on Comedy Central with the sort of mindless regularity that suggests a bored television office staff behind it all. “What do we fill the 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. slot with?” “Fuck it, let’s just put on Office Space again.”)

  Everyone knows very happy white-collar people who can quote Office Space with as much fervor and accuracy as a pastor does the Gospels, and it’s a plausible and routine assumption that repeated watchings of the film might offer a kind of therapy for stressed office workers: a vent for an inarticulate rage that helps keep them humming away at bad jobs. But anecdotally, at least, it’s led to people quitting their jobs, and one Portland, Oregon, Webmaster started a site, Bullshit Job, that doubled as both a tribute to the film and a page where workers could post all the insulting memos and e-mails their bosses sent out.3 In other words, Office Space, and subsequent works in the general fraternity of office satire, helped office workers recognize themselves as belonging to a particular kind of group—a recognition that the office always seemed to deny, since no matter where you were in the office, you were always presumed to be on your way up. (Think of that line from the Stanwyck film: “Baby Face is moving out of your class.”) And part of the brilliance of the film was its insistence that the jobs weren’t bad simply because the office workers were oppressed: they were intrinsically bad jobs, in a bad environment.

  The setup for Office Space represents a larger shift in the understanding of office life. The paradigmatic narrative had been the entry of the rural woman into urban white-collar life, with its attendant sexual terrors; by mid-century, it was the travails of the middle manager attempting to avoid the conformist spirit of organizational life. But the plot of Office Space—reflecting the larger changes in the American economy—is about people being forced to leave an environment they hate, through layoffs; the same is true of the British show The Office (called, in an even more insulting euphemism, “redundancies”) and of the recent American novels of office life Then We Came to the End and Personal Days. The prospect of losing one’s job forces the personal crisis: you come to know who your friends are, what your loyalties are worth, and what your job really is. In Office Space, consultants come to examine the company’s structure to give it a leaner form; though their method is unjust, they really do find people working useless jobs:

  BOB SLYDELL (JOHN C. McGINLEY): What you do at Initech is you take the specifications from the customers, and you bring them down to the software engineers.

  TOM SMYKOWSKI (RICHARD RIEHLE): Yes, yes, that’s right.

  BOB PORTER (PAUL WILLSON): Well, then, I have to ask—why couldn’t the customers just take them directly to the software people?

  TOM: I’ll tell you why. Because engineers are not good at dealing with customers.

  SLYDELL: So you physically take the specs from the customer?

  TOM: Well … no, my secretary does that. Or the fax.

  PORTER: So then you must physically bring them to the software people?

  TOM: Well, no. I mean, sometimes.

  SLYDELL: What would you say you do here?

  TOM: Well, look, I already told you. I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don’t have to. (Screaming.) I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can’t you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?

  Tom Smykowski is defensive about his job, even though he can’t explain what it is he does. Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston), the main protagonist, knows that his job—updating software for the Y2K switch—sucks, and he knows that it’s meaningless; from the vantage point of the new millennium, it seems especially useless. Struggling to explain it to a waitress, Joanna (Jennifer Aniston), he says, “I sit in a cubicle, and I update bank software for the 2000 switch. Well, see they wrote all this bank software, and to save space they used two digits instead of four, so like 98 instead of 1998, uh, so I go through these thousands of lines of code and uh … It doesn’t really matter. I don’t like my job.” Later Peter confesses to the consultants that his average workday consists of coming in fifteen minutes late and “just sort of spac[ing] out for about an hour … I do that for about another hour after lunch too. I’d say in a given week, I only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual work.”

  The twist is that this honesty is exactly what the consultants prize—a kind of ironized version of the “truth-telling” organization man of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Though Peter stops showing up to work and wrecks his work space by dismantling his cubicle walls, the consultants offer him a promotion. “[He’s] just a straight shooter with upper management written all over him,” one consultant says to Peter’s boss. In return, however, they fire two engineers with actual experience, who happen to be Peter’s friends. This sets in motion the increasingly madcap (and implausible) third act, when Peter and his laid-off friends try to program a virus that would scam the company they despise out of thousands of dollars. At the end of the film, one of the company’s disgruntled employees, the sublime mutterer Milton Waddams (Stephen Root), sets the building on fire. Peter’s engineer friends have moved from Initech to its competitor Initrode; Peter himself takes a blue-collar job in construction—preferring the outdoor life to his stationary warren of cubicles.

  Office Space occupies such a tremendous place in the American office worker’s imaginary about his workplace it’s a shame that its effect—or the effect of the larger discourse it’s a part of—has tended to be shallow and focused on the cubicle and dumb bosses. The “space” in Office Space was largely a symbol—of an uncaring, even ruthless organization. Its real targets were the unholy expectations of the
modern workplace, which asked for dedication and commitment, offering none in return. It doubled the force of its condemnation by extending it to other kinds of workplaces. The waitress Joanna works in a chain diner called Chotchkie’s, whose absurd expectations closely resemble those of the office. Part of her job involves donning wacky buttons with slogans and symbols on them, called “flair.” At one point, her boss takes her aside to chastise her about her flair.

  STAN (MIKE JUDGE): Joanna!… We need to talk about your flair.

  JOANNA: Really? I have fifteen pieces on (demonstrating).

  STAN: Fifteen is the minimum, mmkay. It’s up to you whether you want to just do the bare minimum. Brian for example has thirty-seven pieces of flair—and a terrific smile.

  JOANNA: Okay, so you want me to wear more?

  STAN: (Sighing.) Look, Joanna, people can get a cheeseburger anywhere, they come to Chotchkie’s for the atmosphere and the attitude. That’s what the flair’s about. It’s about fun.

  JOANNA: So … more, then.

  STAN: Look, we want you to express yourself. Mmkay? Now, if you feel the bare minimum is enough, well, okay, but some people choose to wear more, and we encourage that. You do want to express yourself, don’t you?

  Joanna’s boss occupies the same place as the office consultants: looking for intangible, personality-based outward expressions as signs of being a “straight shooter”—rather than establishing obvious benchmarks that one meets simply to garner a paycheck. Her suspenders laden with flair suggest nothing so much as cubicle walls, decked out to show one’s “individuality.” The human attachments in Office Space were so strange and obsessive—Milton and his now infamous need to keep his red Swingline stapler—that it was hard to believe there was anything still left to express. Those still immune to the satire of flair, however, are encouraged to check out the catalogs of the office supplier Baudville, which offers, among other choice items, rhinestone-encrusted lanyards as well as T-shirts for appreciation weeks with slogans like “Smells like Team Spirit” and “I Put the ‘Zing’ in Amazing.”

  After such knowledge as Office Space offered, what forgiveness? How could one acknowledge the essential failure of the office to deliver on its promised utopia—and go on as if nothing had happened? For many, the question was merely rhetorical: they were out of work and stringing together temporary gigs as best they could. But for others, the dream of a better office lived on in different ways: some saw technology as still offering a way of moving office work out of the office, into a broader sphere of public life; others saw that the office needed to be made vastly more humane and responsive to its increasingly apathetic denizens. These two paths were united by a single goal: the desire to make work enjoyable, to return it to an innocence that generations of workplace mistakes had rendered corrupt. In an arresting and bleak phrase, the sociologist Max Weber had described the progress of rationality and scientific demystification as leading to a gradual “disenchantment of the world.” Something like that had happened to office work: the rosy image of the office as a distinct, and distinctly middle-class, alternative to the travails of factory work and other manual labor had suffered too many jolts to survive. The office would have to be re-enchanted.

  You enter the new headquarters of TBWAChiatDay through a yellow staircase that rises up from a parking lot into an undistinguished-looking warehouse. The entrance leads past a circular reception desk into a fifty-foot sloping tunnel, which deposits you into what is easily one of the most whimsical offices anyone has ever had the wherewithal to build. Rather than the usual rows of desks or packs of cubicles—that same endless view, repeated in films from The Crowd to The Apartment to Playtime to Office Space, of anonymity and dreariness—you gaze into the middle distance of a block-length street, running past an indoor park and a full-sized basketball court. A three-story cliff-like tower with a handful of warmly lit offices nestled inside provides the only immediate sense that one is indeed in an office, but it feels like an outdoor scene, a glimpse you might catch of late-night work from the pavement as you walk by. And covering it all is a penumbra of buzzing conversation, the sound of workers excitedly greeting each other in the morning as they suck down coffee underneath the black ficus trees in the park.

  TBWAChiatDay hired the architect Clive Wilkinson to redesign its offices in 1997, once the Chiat virtual office experiment had conclusively failed. The design he came up with seemed to have the opposite goal in mind from Chiat’s original vision: rather than condemning workers to the terrifying freedom of a nomadic existence, Wilkinson came up with an office as thoroughly designed as any workplace has ever been since Connecticut General. It was filled with enclosed spaces for meetings, informal and otherwise. One conference room had a table made up of stacked surfboards. Scattered throughout were large white spandex tents hung from the high ceiling; extraordinary to look at, they turn out to tear easily and are expensive to replace. In a nose thumbing at the virtual office, workers still had their own desks, crowded together in broadly segmented, low-partitioned stations; in the cavernous space, they felt as if they were outdoors. (I was told that the crowding was a result of enormous company growth.) A cafeteria serving out six hundred meals a day doubled as a work space: people congregated in the buzzing booths with paninis steaming beside the glow of their laptops. On the wall were creative posters advertising sandwiches that each worker got to create every month—another “culture”-building exercise, a work activity that seemed like leisure. In fact, because there were endless spaces for lounging and goofing off—pool tables, espresso bars, and the basketball court, of course—you had to keep reminding yourself that you were in an office and playtime was only the supplement, or necessary spur, to work time.

  And it turned out that TBWAChiatDay employees had quite a lot of work time. Carol Madonna, a director of office services who had worked there for many years, having even survived the bloodshed of the virtual office days, told me that weekends and nights were pretty common, even when they were punctuated by sweaty five-on-five basketball games, where people got to blow off steam. “Advertising is a team sport,” she kept repeating to me, where people “thrive on chaos” (a line I recognized as a Tom Peters title). This meant that people needed to be in the office together; ideas needed to “cross-pollinate,” something TBWAChiatDay’s mix of private and communal spaces was designed to foster. When I asked about how different this office was from the original radical version that Jay Chiat had wanted, Madonna told me that in the end “Jay had it right.” “He didn’t want you to shut yourself in and hide,” she said.4 And indeed, as I looked around, a good number of the staff seemed to be out, walking from place to place or milling around together. It was shocking how pleasantly noisy the space was, considering its enormous size; I didn’t think I had ever been in an office so filled with conversation that also felt so quiet.

  In its totalizing design, the office was in a sense faithful to the authoritarian spirit of the late Chiat, who had died in 2002. The old virtual office forced workers out of their comfort zone in one way; the Wilkinson design did so even more flagrantly. “Both Utopian commune and Orwellian nightmare,” wrote the architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff in his review when it opened, “whose inhabitants are carefully sealed off from the outside world with their common goal—the subtle manipulation of public desire.”5 From what I could tell, it was neither utopian nor Orwellian; instead, the pervasive whimsy reminded me of nothing so much as Disneyland—which turned out to be, in fact, a deliberate, postmodernist reference by the architect. (The street was called Main Street, after the theme park’s Main Street, U.S.A., section.) Later, Malcolm Gladwell, impressed by the indoor street, would compare the office to the supersubtle network of Greenwich Village that Jane Jacobs described in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. This was a beautifully apt description of what the offices were trying to do, and yet it concealed a fundamental difference. Jacobs’s point about Greenwich Village was that it was partly organic, growing out of the
common work of the city inhabitants. The paradise of TBWAChiatDay was a pleasant but definitely artificial one; if we were thinking in city terms, we might imagine something more like a cul-de-sac in Celebration, Florida, than the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal.