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Rise of The Fishbowl
How cookies broke a team and created a resistance
My first full-time, civilian writing job placed me in “The Fishbowl,” so dubbed by my coworkers — a glass-encircled, open-plan work room where we were strategically placed to give visitors looking through the glass the impression of a busy, brilliant think tank hard at work creating masterpieces of business writing.
This was a professional company, and we were required to dress for business — but not look like an executive. For the men, that meant a shirt and tie, no rolled sleeves allowed, and no suit coat or blazer. For the women, skirts and long-sleeved shirts — no pantsuits, no dresses (that uniform was for the secretaries).
Anyone who writes knows that much of the process involves staring blankly into space, mouth half-open, between pecking out half-sentences and berating one’s self-worth. Doing that in The Fishbowl would elicit a sharp “Straighten up!” from the operations manager sitting at a large desk outside the glass curtain wall. We had to keep our heads down, focus on the computer screen, and never, ever look at the clients.
If we needed to ask someone else a question, we weren’t allowed to get up and go to their desk. We couldn’t even look over the half-wall of our cubicle to talk to the person next to us. To get around this, we…
