Broadcast Mode

As I’ve alluded to before, the office where I’ve now worked for nearly a year is a cubicle farm. (I reside at cube 1BC18, which certainly sounds Borg-esque.) I’ve had cubes before, but each time I was in a technical sales role and the cube pretty much collected dust while I met with clients or worked from home. About once a month, I made the pilgrimage to the cube to file expense reports. The other years of my career, I had an office.

Sometimes I really miss my own office.

I’ve been puzzling through internet protocol routing issues all afternoon, so permit me to use this as an analogy. In a grossly simplistic model of computer networking, you can have point-to-point communication and broadcast communication. The whole basis of the Internet—web, email, online banking—is point-to-point communication. Even “broadcasts” on the web are nothing but a massive collection of point-to-point dialogs. In a simpler time (e.g., the Carter Administration), computing networks made more aggressive use of broadcast protocols: everyone got every message, and you simply ignored the stuff that wasn’t addressed to you.

I’ve come to realize that working in a cube farm is like being on one of those old-time networks. Unlike other public places—libraries, banks, your local DMV office—there is no point-to-point communication here. All the coworkers are in broadcast mode, all the time. Conference calls, ad hoc corridor meetings, and the guy two cubes over who won’t shut up about the U-T basketball team—all of them are broadcasting continuously at full volume.

Think of the voice you use when you go to the bank. (If you don’t bank in person anymore, humor me.) Imagine approaching the teller and announcing your intent to withdraw $500 in cash. This is the definition of a point-to-point conversation. Of course, in the modern IT workplace, these types of conversations take place in conference rooms. That leaves all the detritus to float endlessly through the cube farm and drive us all insane. It’s valuable to, at most, three people in earshot; if there were any more of them, they’d book a conference room. Most of the time it’s two guys or gals just spending their time, like Biblical Athenians, telling or hearing “some new thing.” The rest of us have no choice but to receive the broadcast, however useless it is to us, and discard it.

So much for the efficiency of the modern workplace. Telecommute, anyone?