Our New Open Office Will Foster the Creativity of Insane Masochists

From: Management
To: Staff
Re: New Seating Arrangement

We have decided to create a new dynamic for collaboration and multi-approach innovation by asking you all to push your desks together. We are removing those cubicles and emptying out the offices and you will all be forming up into desk "venture units" and "task groups". These will help introduce flexibility and enhance communication. Have a task? Form a group! Opening a venture? Gather a unit.

Google does this, folks. Google. Are we a Google or are we a Yahoo?

The managers and vice presidents will observe this new creative environment from our offices. If you need anything to enhance your task-oriented groups, feel free to knock or use one of the communication baskets we have placed outside our offices to drop a note.

From: Management
To: Staff
Re: Concerns

Several of you have emailed Cynthia concerning the new open floor plan, which has been a great success so far. Apparently it is leading to feelings of hopelessness with some of you describing a crawling sensation, as if you are mites on the eyelashes of a giant, pitiless eyeball staring right at you. The creeping fear that a manager might walk up behind you at any moment or hear you from across the room has similarly been described as "suffocating."

Discomfort is a natural reaction to change. Do you want us to switch to those chairs where you have to kneel at your desk? Drop a note in our baskets if that's really what you want.

True, you may work every moment inside a digital panopticon, breathlessly afraid that the cutbacks we made last summer will now fall upon you in retaliation for a moment of relaxation or leisure taken in a 10+ hour workday. Not so! We are watching, but purely for the sake of streamlining our operation. We want to see how you work to know how we can better help you. Feel free to relax several times throughout the day. But do not exceed five times and no more than one minute at a time.

Also no streaming music on Pandora.

From: Management
To: Staff
Re: Please email Cynthia

Locked doors should be a clear signal that managers and VPs want to be left alone. If you force open a manager's office and find a straw-stuffed dummy sitting in the Aeron chair you must understand that is part of our new freedom initiative. It's Japanese. We learned it from the Japan office. You should not be opening manager's offices. It interferes with task concentration and outcome realization. Please email Cynthia if you need anything.

We have also had to block Youtube.