Pod City* **

My morale has been crushed to dust
On the road to Pod City
Devil’s slow to recognize
That we all slowly die in Pod City
Young workers flock to the private workstations
Checkin’ out toys, checking out corporate bought features
Pacify, sanctify
To the old school feelin’, Pod City

Pod City, it’s not pretty
We complain, complain to so many
Pod City, it’s not pretty
It’s not the job of your dreams

*Sung to the tune of Zap City by The Cult.

**My sincerest apologies to Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy.

As an analyst, I’m often expected to deliver complicated analyses of business performance and help determine whether proposed revenue generating and expense cutting initiatives are worth the effort.  I also have a roster of weekly, monthly and quarterly reports that get delivered to the higher up muckety mucks at my site as well as muckety mucks across the county at corporate headquarters.

As you can imagine, such work requires a lot of mental focus.  I had been fortunate enough to have directors that understand this type of work needs a fair amount of quiet time to complete projects. The last five workstations I’ve been assigned to at my current job have been cubes that were somewhat hidden on the floor .  Background noise could easily be obscured by a good pair of earphones and an iPod.

Two months ago, those of us on my floor were given a one week notice that we had to move one floor up because corporate was expanding their sales team and was taking over the floor where myself and other operations staff were located.  The floor we were relocated to already housed several other departments.  Because there was so much expense involved with re-configuring the floor I had to vacate, us lowly operations people had to take whatever workstations already existed on the new floor. Unfortunately, most of the existing workstation on my new floor are pods.

You may be asking yourself at this point, what are pods? In my organization, pods are basically like huge cubes, with workstations for 6-8 people.  So you aren’t exactly sitting in an open environment, but you don’t exactly have any privacy either.  I’ve done my best to illustrate the pod I now sit in below.

                                                     Yes folks, I sit inside a domino.

Now, I’m not a snob, and I’m not anti-social, so I’m not opposed to sitting in  a pod.  However, there are a couple of problems with my current setup:

1. There are just too many people in the pod.  At times, I’ve almost smacked into another person trying to enter or exit the pod.

2. It’s not shown above, but there is a fax machine in the pod that sales people use all damn day because they don’t want to learn how to use the fax machine on the multi-function printer.  It happens to be located at the foot of my workstation.  It also exacerbates the problem mentioned in item one above.

Having a heavily used fax machine located right behind me makes me feel like this guy. Also, who the hell still uses fax machines? 

3. There are people from other teams sitting in the pod with myself and my colleague.  One of the teams has a very loud manager who loves to visit his team to randomly deliver some stupid new policy (the latest was that they couldn’t use their cell phones to make personal calls during business hours) or threaten expanded work hours just to show off his authority in front of the whole floor. I’m not super thrilled about my manager, but she is a saint compared to this guy.  On the upside, it is fun to constantly remind them of the things they aren’t allowed to do but I can do because I don’t report to their boss.

Nyah Nyah- at least I can make prank calls from my desk if I really wanted to and you can’t. 

4. The walkway in front of my workstation is heavily used by sales managers going to and from his/her offices. They love to stop and chat with those of us whose workstations face the walkway.

5. The pod is located right near the ELEVATOR!  Therefore I see everyone entering and exiting the floor. Also, the space between our pod and the elevator is a popular hangout for people to congregate and have extremely loud chit-chats.

Man: That last sales call was rough, but not as rough as this meeting we just attended!

Woman: No kidding! OMG, I had to pee so bad I couldn’t wait for the meeting to be over. Oh well I should stop by my desk and check my messages. 

Man: I suppose I should too, but I don’t sit on this floor. 

Woman: Me either! Let’s talk for at least another five minutes at 100 decibels about nothing in particular!

I do fancy myself as someone who takes pride in their work and strives to complete work in a timely and accurate fashion.  However, coinciding with this ill-plan move is a delayed budget and strategic planning timeline.  In previous years, these activities had been wrapped up by October. Not this year! This year, the whole process has been dragged out.  Instead, these activities are being revisited and finalized through the end of November. Awesome.

So imagine my rising hostility  urge to scream concern when my manager made a comment that our VP of sales is wondering why my team is behind on reports and requests lately. I calmly answered that while the workload has definitely skyrocketed in the past four weeks, the current seating arrangement is an obstacle to productivity.  My boss then wanted more specifics on how the current seating arrangement is distracting, so I recounted the past hour’s worth of gossip from just my podmates:

– Tara, the women who sits on the other side of me, was really upset about an email a sales manager sent asking if she made any progress.  Just then her loud mouth supervisor walked in wanting to know why she was “pissed”.  She said she was “being checked up on”.  He thought she was nuts and they argued about this for about 5 minutes.

-Georgie, another podmate on Tara’s team, loudly asked loud mouth supervisor if he would be “S.O.L.” if her co-worker Dan quit.  Loudmouth boss said he wouldn’t be “S.O.L.” but Georgie and Tara would be “S.O.L.”.   Dan then messaged me wanting to know when I could help him update his resume.

-Georgie then went to the other side of the pod to tell everyone how her current boyfriend was trying to get her an interview as a recruiter at some company. Later that morning she recounted her past weekend to Tara, which mostly sounded like babysitting her boyfriend who got really drunk.

So just as I have been advised to suck it up and deal with sitting in a fishbowl that everyone on the floor likes to peek into, the company will have to deal with how dumping people in said fishbowl affects productivity. Is this an unprofessional attitude? Perhaps. At the same time, I really could care less. And as I mentioned above, I get to hear all the juicy gossip on the floor without actually leaving my desk, which will provide a good amount of content for this blog in the coming weeks.