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From: www.indefinitearticles.co.uk Children visit an Office - Berlin, 15th August 2030 A group of astonished 5th grade children were shown round Germany’s only remaining "history-office" ("Historischesarchivmuseumarbeitsbüro") this week on a school trip designed to show changes in working practices in the recent past. "The children were amazed to see that even as recently as twenty years ago people travelled every day, sometimes for over an hour, to a place far from their homes to work", said teacher Fräulein Grüber (age not given). "The children’s astonishment alternated with loud bursts of spontaneous laughter at the absurdity of the idea." Venerable museum curator Gerhard Gräber, 71, remarked, "Offices such as these saw the playing of the famous ‘German bureaucrats’ game, of which the only rule was that the first person to move, loses. The game’s popularity saw it spread quickly to all other public and private offices world wide and it is still, apparently, practised by some employees in their home offices. People would mainly get together in the ‘office’ to chat about the previous night’s television at locations in the building called ‘coffee points’. Light banter called ‘office gossip’ and flirting would take up many blissful hours, speculating who would be promoted or sacked in between sending email jokes to co-workers and looking for holidays (or other things) on the Internet. We were so ‘busy’, but really we got very little done, particularly when the computers were down. Ha! Ha! Ha! Happy days!" One of the children, Gottlieb Gröber, 10, said, "We could not believe that special buildings were made just for people to work in! All that land, heating, lighting, air-conditioning and then to fill them with desks, paper and carpets!" "When our teacher said that 70% of the space in these ‘offices’ remained unoccupied during ‘office’ hours, we did not believe her. So this is where pollution came from - driving to these places! Imagine the time and effort it must have taken every day just to get there and stare at a computer like the one at home. Just how did companies make any money?" Part of the visit covered a time almost pre-Internet when people could not get free, 3-D video conferencing on demand and, of course, Sensotron technology had not been invented, so people could not digitally feel, smell and taste anything. Young Gröber remarked that using one of their three annual SocialKid days to visit the ‘office’ as a group had been a bit like recreating those far-off times and said his friends quite liked all being together, instead of learning remotely alone at home. A return of the ‘office romance’? For better or worse, not for these young people. From: www.indefinitearticles.co.uk © Alex MacCaskill November 2005
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