CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS : OFFICES WITHOUT PHONES First, cell phone plans and costs

CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS : OFFICES WITHOUT PHONES

First, cell phone plans and costs are absurdly cheap here. I think in the states I tend to pay well over a hundred a month, and close to two hundred. During heavy business usage plans run six to fifteen hundred a month. (And yes, I have enough knowledge of the different phone companies to know how much of that is wasted on marketing to customers who are not loyal, and how much poorly our regulators protect us from penalty pricing. In penatlty pricing the profits are made by enticing customers with low prices and setting low limits on account usage and charging absurd penalties for going over those limits. This violates the principle of asymmetry of knowledge. And it ends up sending the lower classes to collection and further charges. So yes, I think it’s a hazard, and yes, I think it violates libertarian property rights.

Second, when you go into an office here, at least the offices that I’ve been into, it’s just not a given that everyone will have a company provided phone, unless they absolutely need one for their work.

Desks, as we know them. are places where you can store clerical equipment. they are workbenches for people who calculate abstractions rather than modify the physical world.

But if you have a laptop and a cell phone (or a laptop and skype) you pretty much can work lying down on a couch, or standing at a bar, or in my favorite repose, sitting in a chair with your feet up. Now the truth is, that comfortable seating inversely proportional the the impact on your health. We need to walk. We compensate by standing at standing-desks. Some of us have discovereed the abdominal value of sitting on an exercise ball at a desk, which works your abs eight ours a day. Most of us sit in chairs at desks, which if we use reasonable posture is bad for our hearts and waistlines, but that’s all. Ohters of us recline in couches and chairs, because all we have to do is talk or write text, and a desk is unnecessary, but this is the worst possible place to put your body if you don’t get up and move around every thirty minutes or so.

All that said, if we don’t need phones, at least some portion of us don’t need desks. But that’s probably bad for our health. So, the next work environment I”m going to put together will have desks at the perimeter, and lots of lounges for working comfortably, and ad-hoc, with the people that you need to.

Now, I realize that technologists are a narrow segment. And that technologists don’t necessarily signal using office spaces. But for some of us, it’s just paradise to sit in a comfy chair and crank out our ideas.

Offices need not be structured around phones.