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textualdevianceSo, yay for getting my contract extended, but boo for the fact that we're going to be moving to a new building in a couple of weeks.
Said building itself isn't bad--it's in the middle of a nice retail area that might be useful to traipse around on lunch breaks. Problem is, it has shitty parking, which means us contractors have to park three blocks away. Fortunately, I'm going to be carpooling most of the time, but on the days I can't for some reason, I'm basically fucked.
Even worse than that, however, is that I discovered the new pad (not one of the usual company buildings) has this Modern Open Workspace Design (TM). It's set up more or less like a school, with a bunch of open desks scattered around in each "pod" (AKA classroom) space. Each team has a pod, and everyone's all squished together in this pod, with no individual office or even cube spaces. Just tiny desks with a little bit of storage space and a single partition between you and the next schlub.
Ugh.
I can only imagine that the nitwits who came up with this idea are the sorts of chitchatty, featherbrained idjits you usually find in Design! schools, who don't know the first thing about how people who can think on their own need to work. In their world, just about everything is done in a team/collaborative environment. It's basically all meetings, all day. Everyone sits around yammering on to each other, brainstorming the beautiful things they're going to create, and pretty much no one actually sits down and does any real work on their own.
That's SO not how I work. It's not how anyone on this team works. This floor? Is dead quiet most of the time because everyone has their heads down over their keyboards actually getting shit done. This is a production environment, not a creative one. "Fostering interactivity" between us isn't going to make us work better in any way whatsoever. We aren't a team. We're individual workers doing individual jobs on deadline, and most of us get pretty pissed off when some talkative douchenozzle (usually some clueless git who isn't from around here) starts distracting us from our jobs.
Yes, the editors have a few meetings here and there to talk about upcoming content plans, but that's basically it. Everyone else on this floor is only going to get slowed down by a more-open workspace.
Especially me. Yaye, ADD. :(
I'm barely functional in the space I have now, which is sort of like a stripped down set of carrels. I have maybe a foot of space on either side. I can hear every little tap of the keyboard for everyone else nearby. I have to have my headphones on pretty much all day so I can shut out the noise and other distractions and actually get something done. Without that? I'm useless.
Obviously, folks like me and other people who live inside their heads most of the time when they're working were not at all considered by the designers who plan these spaces. I'm sure they only consulted a bunch of management sorts who are already used to being in constant meetings, and don't have to actually do any production work, who thought that it'd be just fine to have a pod full of barely-contained chaos in which to work. Their jobs require constantly talking to other people. Mine is exactly the opposite, and that's the case for every single other production worker here.
I'm honestly not sure how I'm going to survive this, between the shitty parking situation and trying to get work done when everyone else around me is talking all the damned time.
Technically speaking, I can contact my agency and let them know that I'm at risk for having concentration issues, and I could probably get some sort of accomodation, but really, that's the last thing I want to do. If my disability were something that had nothing to do with how I do my job, I'd be fine with being out about it. This? I can't. I just can't have my boss knowing that I'm deficient that way. Legal or no, it's the sort of thing that colors how people evaluate the work you do, and whether they want to hire you back again. They never put it in so many (actionable) words. They just start taking your mistakes more seriously, and being more nervous about whether you can do the job, and eventually decide that you're more trouble than you're worth.
I think it's great that more workplaces (especially around here) are taking disabilities into consideration when they're designing. I just wish they included things like ADD and ASDs on their list of considerations. This sort of open workspace bullshit is pretty much proof positive that they don't.
Said building itself isn't bad--it's in the middle of a nice retail area that might be useful to traipse around on lunch breaks. Problem is, it has shitty parking, which means us contractors have to park three blocks away. Fortunately, I'm going to be carpooling most of the time, but on the days I can't for some reason, I'm basically fucked.
Even worse than that, however, is that I discovered the new pad (not one of the usual company buildings) has this Modern Open Workspace Design (TM). It's set up more or less like a school, with a bunch of open desks scattered around in each "pod" (AKA classroom) space. Each team has a pod, and everyone's all squished together in this pod, with no individual office or even cube spaces. Just tiny desks with a little bit of storage space and a single partition between you and the next schlub.
Ugh.
I can only imagine that the nitwits who came up with this idea are the sorts of chitchatty, featherbrained idjits you usually find in Design! schools, who don't know the first thing about how people who can think on their own need to work. In their world, just about everything is done in a team/collaborative environment. It's basically all meetings, all day. Everyone sits around yammering on to each other, brainstorming the beautiful things they're going to create, and pretty much no one actually sits down and does any real work on their own.
That's SO not how I work. It's not how anyone on this team works. This floor? Is dead quiet most of the time because everyone has their heads down over their keyboards actually getting shit done. This is a production environment, not a creative one. "Fostering interactivity" between us isn't going to make us work better in any way whatsoever. We aren't a team. We're individual workers doing individual jobs on deadline, and most of us get pretty pissed off when some talkative douchenozzle (usually some clueless git who isn't from around here) starts distracting us from our jobs.
Yes, the editors have a few meetings here and there to talk about upcoming content plans, but that's basically it. Everyone else on this floor is only going to get slowed down by a more-open workspace.
Especially me. Yaye, ADD. :(
I'm barely functional in the space I have now, which is sort of like a stripped down set of carrels. I have maybe a foot of space on either side. I can hear every little tap of the keyboard for everyone else nearby. I have to have my headphones on pretty much all day so I can shut out the noise and other distractions and actually get something done. Without that? I'm useless.
Obviously, folks like me and other people who live inside their heads most of the time when they're working were not at all considered by the designers who plan these spaces. I'm sure they only consulted a bunch of management sorts who are already used to being in constant meetings, and don't have to actually do any production work, who thought that it'd be just fine to have a pod full of barely-contained chaos in which to work. Their jobs require constantly talking to other people. Mine is exactly the opposite, and that's the case for every single other production worker here.
I'm honestly not sure how I'm going to survive this, between the shitty parking situation and trying to get work done when everyone else around me is talking all the damned time.
Technically speaking, I can contact my agency and let them know that I'm at risk for having concentration issues, and I could probably get some sort of accomodation, but really, that's the last thing I want to do. If my disability were something that had nothing to do with how I do my job, I'd be fine with being out about it. This? I can't. I just can't have my boss knowing that I'm deficient that way. Legal or no, it's the sort of thing that colors how people evaluate the work you do, and whether they want to hire you back again. They never put it in so many (actionable) words. They just start taking your mistakes more seriously, and being more nervous about whether you can do the job, and eventually decide that you're more trouble than you're worth.
I think it's great that more workplaces (especially around here) are taking disabilities into consideration when they're designing. I just wish they included things like ADD and ASDs on their list of considerations. This sort of open workspace bullshit is pretty much proof positive that they don't.
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I just hope that most of the people around me will understand that headphones on = do not disturb.
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When I'm really busy, and I'm firing on all cylinders, I don't need it, but if I'm doing repetitive stuff that doesn't require serious thought, I have to have something else for my brain to do while I'm pushing the buttons. If I didn't have music while driving, for instance, I'd get all distracted by the pretty scenery and plow up some poor minivan's tailpipe.
There are a lot of things I don't like about my job, but the company itself is really quite nice in terms of flexibility with work styles. They have far too many ASD geniuses there not to be. Unfortunately, that doesn't always translate to contractors or people outside their core business. I'm a writer/web geek. Clearly that means I'm a Creative Person who needs the same environment as an artsy fartsy designer. Ehm. No. Sigh...
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