The illusionist’s trick

Featured in

  • Published 20140805
  • ISBN: 9781922182425
  • Extent: 264 pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

VISITING SYDNEY FROM New York before Christmas, I dropped by the office of a client and former colleague. Her employer, a large law firm, recently moved to swanky new premises and she was keen to take me on a tour. As we strolled the eerily quiet corridors, the towering windows, antiseptic surfaces and noiseless elevator doors put me in mind of the inside of a spaceship. At any moment I half-expected the two of us to defy gravity and lift off from the gleaming polished floor.

The cost of maintaining the illusion of worker freedom through extravagant fit-outs seems to grow with every decade. The office’s split-level mezzanine and cafeteria exaggerated the sense of a space–time continuum. Designed as a hub for meetings of all kinds, the mezzanine encourages flexibility of human movement within the larger workplace, which remains tethered to that relic of twentieth century work practices, the billable hour. Looking around, I felt a retrospective pang for the lifestyle extras a corporate job used to afford me. But having ‘consciously uncoupled’ myself as a full-time employee from the corporate workplace eight years earlier, it felt like viewing Earth from deep space.

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

Sex and the single bed

Memoir A HEIGHT-ADJUSTIBLE HOSPITAL bed. At first I didn't understand what the nurses meant. For a moment I pictured our queen-sized mattress atop some contraption...

More from this edition

From blackboards to e-learning

GR OnlineI STARTED TEACHING in 1974 in suburban Melbourne. I had a class of twenty-eight grade two children whose average age was seven-and-a-half. From February...

Refuge without work

ReportageShortlisted, 2014 Human Rights Award, Print and Online AwardMY INTERVIEW WITH Mr Syed did not get off to a great start. We’d arranged to...

More than a job

IntroductionAUSTRALIA WAS ONCE known as the land of the long weekend. It was a snappy catchphrase that, like all the best clichés, embodied enough...

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.