Everyone hates offices. I don't know anyone who gets excited about offices in general. No one is thrilled because of the office. Everyone complains about them. You'd think they were sheer torture.
They're mostly just dull and designed poorly.
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I remember -- but have been unable to locate -- a picture of a big magazine subscription department from more than a century ago. I think it was Ladies' Home Journal, then based in Philadelphia, which advertised itself as "The Magazine with a Million," meaning a million subscribers in 1903 -- a towering achievement at the time, something no other U.S. magazine had done. The subscription office was a huge floor with tiny little desks laid out like a vast bingo card. Each worker had his or her little desk to process subscriptions. It must have been hot, boring as hell, and I don't know how anyone could have stayed awake. No one was rushing to the bathroom to check TikTok or play Wordscapes. It probably paid peanuts, too.
On the other hand, it was not expected to be a career in and of itself. A man working the tiny desk might be going to business school at night -- a perfectly acceptable alternative to college then. A woman doing the job would probably be expected to leave to get married at some point, unless she was supporting her sickly old mom. But it was desirable work, in that you were not being run off your feet like a waitress or digging ditches like a slob.
Bad and boring as it may be, office jobs were considered superior to other kinds of work. In many regards, they still are, although the way we krex and moan about them you'd think we were getting surgery without anesthesia every day. To be fair, in 1903 there were no overweening tin-pot HR dictators, no "team building" exercises, and no mandatory training to tell you to respect one another's pronouns.
Did offices ever really have this kind of thing?
No place I ever worked, at least that I know of. Yes, folks, this is a genuine book from 1962, and this is what guys used to do before X-rated movies and OnlyFans. See why Americans were more literate in those days? We even had to read to get our naughty thrills.
Things have changed so much since 1962, let alone 1903. Automation and computers have been eating away at jobs for decades, and guys like Elon Musk say they'll even take over the "creative" businesses like advertising. The Internet has devastated the magazine business as much as any other. Ladies' Home Journal closed up shop almost ten years ago. Rival Good Housekeeping is still alive as a magazine, but I've heard that in the 2010s, LHJ had lots of boneheaded management hastening its end.
Except for those who program and feed the computers, office jobs may be on the way out entirely. We may complain about them, but we'll miss them when they're gone.
Bartleby the scrivener was an office worker, you know.
Ah, office! Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!
