I love the company where I work. I love the work that I do.
I just don’t love where I do it.
I work at a major healthcare system in East Tennessee that is responsible for the oversight and management of ten hospitals and more than 100 doctor’s offices. I am fiercely proud to call this firm my employer, to the point that I smile every morning when I drive to work and see the company logo on the sign at the entrance to the business park, when I see my name juxtaposed alongside my job title and the name of my employer on my ID badge, and when I tell people where I work.
But one thing I noticed during my interview, and which I have noticed every day since I started my job, is just how incredibly dreary the actual building itself is – one specific part of the building, in particular.
The actual office where I work reminds me a lot of my professors’ offices when I attended the University of Tennessee as an undergraduate approximately 100 years ago; it’s well-lit, feels like a space conducive to deep work, and with my choice of reading materials on the bookshelf over my shoulder, it feels a little intellectual, a little homey, and very much “me.” (Those reading materials run the gamut from Financial Management: Theory and Practice by Brigham and Gapenski, an excellent MBA-level finance text, to Moneyball by Michael Lewis, the engaging account of the birth of modern sabermetrics within the Oakland Athletics in the 2002 season. I enthusiastically recommend them both.)
Just outside my office is what modern office worker parlance would invariably call a “cube farm.” It is certainly professional, if not industrial, in proportion, containing fourteen pods of 16 cubicles (that’s 224 cubicles for those of you playing along at home) whose walls are about 170 cm tall (67 inches for those of you who don’t use a sensible measurement system). Long hallways run down either side of the cube farm, measuring about 50 m from end to end, each hallway flanked by the offices of salaried employees such as myself and alcoves where Xerox machines and file cabinets used to live. I’m two doors down from Edith1, my manager, and three doors from Leslie2, my supervisor, and when she is in the office, I share the office with Janice3, a particularly nice colleague. The three of us communicate via Microsoft Teams and the landline phone on my desk more than we do face-to-face, a consequence of working for a remote-first department within what is very much a traditional organization. If I am feeling particularly crabby and have brought my own lunch from home, I can step into my office at 7:30, step out at 16:00, and not lay my eyes on another human being in the interim. The fact that this is possible in an organization of eleven thousand employees still boggles my mind. The fact that this is possible in an office complex where more than 500 people are present on any given day is equally mind-boggling.
Walking down the long hallways is decent exercise if it’s raining outside, and you do occasionally see other people going to and from the coffee maker, the toilet, the nearest conference room, et cætera. If you listen closely, you can hear fragments of conversations: colleagues conferring on difficult claims, commiserating over difficult patients, haggling with insurance carriers, and counseling bewildered patients who may never fully understand their medical bills (and not for lack of trying). Some days, I feel as though I am Kafka’s ungeheueres Ungeziefer4, my interactions with these colleagues fleeting and impersonal, howdy-dos and thank-yous that serve only as social lubricant and build little true camaraderie, just one cockroach skittering along the floor alongside all the others, all too often viewed by the clinicians I serve as a necessary evil, not a business partner.
The signs hanging at the end of each of the rows of cubicles tell stories of their own, each “pod” being allocated to a specific job function, a seeming assembly line of medical billing professionals. Notably, Appeals and Accounts Receivable, two sides of the same coin (and two jobs that I did) at a former employer, are at opposite ends of the building here. My own job function as an auditor stands up in the coaches’ box, not even on the sidelines, overseeing every snap of every game like that one room at NFL headquarters where the watchers of the watchmen congregate, evaluating the work of the officials in real time. The work is siloed in ways that the arrangement of these cubicles doesn’t initially give away.
And perhaps it is because of the sheer scale, but there seems to be no camaraderie here, no sense of common purpose, no esprit de corps. At my last job, where I was at the crook of a U-shaped arrangement of cubicles, I knew or at least recognized almost everyone I worked with. They knew of my fondness for boneless pilchards and Teresa Teng music and my ability to speak Mandarin Chinese very poorly. They knew that I was called William (not Will, Willie, Bill, Billy, or Liam), that I drove a black Volkswagen, and that I loved mathematics beyond all rational thought. Here, I remain a mystery, a cog slipped silently into a machine that ran fine without it, working as well as an experienced operator despite relatively little training, going by praise from Leslie and Edith that I still feel is largely unearned.
Given over as I am to deep thought, to calm consideration, and to slow learning, I can’t help but notice the stark contrasts at play. While it is indeed a red flag (one waved by a redhead donning a red jumpsuit), the previous employer that alleged itself to offer a familial working environment at least tried to offer that. In many ways, that environment—while not superior to the current one in any substantive way—was more pleasant to work in when it worked well. Coworkers would stop by my cubicle for a chat or tag me on Teams, they would make the effort to include me in company activities, and when I put in my notice and word started to make its way around, many people stopped by to offer me their well wishes, a group of people that ran up the chain of command as high as the vice-president of the division.
I have the strong suspicion that I could leave my current employer tomorrow and no one would miss me. On the one hand, that is as it should be; a corporate office is a knowledge factory and when one of its pieces of equipment (read: one of its knowledge workers) leaves, it simply creates an opening for a new piece of equipment to take its place. But on the other hand, the humanist in me mourns the loss of community that comes with the scaling of a company into an enormous enterprise.
Great work goes on beneath the harsh fluorescent lighting, amid the overly tall cubicle walls, within the needlessly constraining confines of the tiny cubicles, each of them feeling smaller than a half-bathroom. Walking among the cubicles, you see expressions of individuality that break up the depressing uniformity; one coworker is particularly fond of the wonderful Robin Williams film Good Morning Vietnam and a copy of its theatrical release poster hangs on one cubicle wall; another imbues her cubicle with whimsy by decorating for whatever holiday is upcoming. Others assert their dominance by reminding you that they are indeed their department’s supervisor even though they work in a double-sized cubicle that gives away their privileged status at a glance. The thought of slaving away for years, earning only modest raises, only to be rewarded by moving up to a larger cubicle, is depressing in a way older generations may not fully understand. And yet as I sit in my office, which is 80% of the time a private office, the one thing I miss is being out there among the hourly workers, working as one of them, as I used to do, exchanging barbs about difficult insurance payers and miscoded claims.
I can’t help but feel, whenever I step out of the office to go to the toilet or the break room, that my employer’s work environment was designed this way specifically to file down everyone’s individuality, to make everyone out to be a Weberian shadow of their former selves while they are here working, an active refutation of the modern notion of bringing one’s whole self to work. The management literature I have studied in the abortive pursuit of a second bachelor’s degree in business would seem to confirm my suspicion, that in certain quarters of business praxis (if not research), the death of the individual is indeed the goal of capitalism. This misguided consideration forgets that individuals are what make the machinery of capitalism continue to turn, for it is individuals who see the doctor for their lumbago, purchase jars of Lao Gan Ma chili crisp to season their Chinese food, and subscribe to iCloud Plus because it’s easier than setting up a Time Machine disk on their home network5.
Does the future hold remote work? Perhaps. My employer is warm to the idea; most of my coworkers in my department work remotely, and at least one of my colleagues has rather proudly told me of how her choice to work remotely has seen her interacting even less with people, bragging about her choice as though reducing her interactions with other people were something to be proud of. To borrow an old Internet meme, bragging about her willful reduction of human contact is the very essence of “weird flex but OK.”
I am not so eager to consign myself to completely remote work. I remember 2020: the uncertainty, the isolation, the confinement, what felt to me like penance for an uncommitted sin. I remember what 2020 did to my brain, the dark places that year plunged me into that would otherwise have remained unplumbed. When it became available, I immediately took the experimental vaccine, and when it became an option, I immediately went back to work in the office, only working remotely when I was too sick to drive to work.6 The human connection I get at work, fleeting though it may be, is the only part of the office life that isn’t dystopian at first blush—in view of this, then, I will continue to make the drive across the county to the office, proudly carrying my Zero Halliburton briefcase into the office that it took my entire career to reach, striving toward the next major waypoint on my career journey.
Hm. Perhaps this place isn’t quite so dystopian after all.
Note: A previous revision of this essay quoted the length of the building as 150 m. The true length is much closer to 50 m. Numbers are hard.