A hallway runs through it

Behold, the open-office concept at its best.

No walls, no doors, no place to hide from the nausea of advertising's many fatal flaws.

No barriers to prohibit the common collective collaborative process all in the name of productivity. If this sounds like your office then you will appreciate this malarkey.

Comrade, I too work in one of the modern-day sweatshops we call the ad agency creative floor—rows of desks and monitors and keyboards and perfectly aligned. Even the break-rooms are positioned away from the "shop" floor so as to promote efficiency and discourage the thing they were designed for: breaks.

Well between sessions of mundane meetings, other creatives and I will scurry over to the kitchen to top off our coffee. The dilemma? That scurry takes us through and behind a space for accounts.

Mind you, the hallways are open, and it cuts the time to the kitchen in half. Sounds harmless, right? If only that were so.

We received a quick "word."

I want you all to be aware that running through my office does not make you more discrete; it's actually a lot more distracting than strolling past. I understand there will be passerby now and then, but please be respectful of our workspace.

To be fair, there is another way around. We do have the option to go another route. And I won't hold the scold against the person(s) who feel this way. It's not their fault that we as an industry have accepted this contrived sense of naked creativity as the standard or, dare I say, trend. It's not as if they drew up the floor plan or architectural plans either.

However, this is an open office, and things like privacy and space get in the way of our "collaboration." At the very least, it makes it easy to interrupt us from the shelter of our conch shell headphones.

It's supposed to make us more productive. In my experience, the open office has made us more insular, protective, less likely to share and more likely to seek cover in bathroom stalls and behind monitors. It's supposed to work, but it does the opposite. And, I need my coffee more than your corner station.

Call my mother.
Sue me.
Tweet about it.
Kick my door in.

Let me know when you find one.