Dial P for Privacy: The Phone Booth Is Back (nytimes.com) 110
As mobile phone use exploded and the pay phone was increasingly linked to crime, the booth began to disappear. But things are appear to be changing. From a report: Now, the phone booth -- or at least a variation of it -- is making a modest comeback. When the women-only club and work space The Wing opened its first location in the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan in October of 2016, the interior featured marble tables, pink velvet couches, and one small, windowless, reflective glass-doored room dubbed the Phone Booth. One year later, when another location of The Wing opened in Soho, eight built-in, glass-doored call rooms were included in the design. [...]
Other companies that have recently purchased Zenbooths include Volkswagen, Lyft, Meetup and Capital One. The Berkeley, Calif., company was launched in 2016, and its products range from $3,995 (for a standard one-person booth) to $15,995 (for a two-person "executive" booth). The one-person booth is a soundproof, eco-friendly, American-made box that's about 36 inches wide and 34 inches deep, with an insulated glass door, a ventilation fan, power outlets and a skylight -- and it can be assembled in roughly an hour. (It does not, however, contain an actual phone.) Sam Johnson, a co-founder of the company, said it produced "hundreds" of Zenbooths a month in 2017. This year, it's on track to quadruple that production. But he doesn't call them phone booths. "We're manufacturing quiet spaces and privacy," he said.
Zenbooth is not the only free-standing office phone booth in the game. Companies like Cubicall, Nomad, and TalkBox, among others, are offering up solutions to the modern office's privacy problem.
Other companies that have recently purchased Zenbooths include Volkswagen, Lyft, Meetup and Capital One. The Berkeley, Calif., company was launched in 2016, and its products range from $3,995 (for a standard one-person booth) to $15,995 (for a two-person "executive" booth). The one-person booth is a soundproof, eco-friendly, American-made box that's about 36 inches wide and 34 inches deep, with an insulated glass door, a ventilation fan, power outlets and a skylight -- and it can be assembled in roughly an hour. (It does not, however, contain an actual phone.) Sam Johnson, a co-founder of the company, said it produced "hundreds" of Zenbooths a month in 2017. This year, it's on track to quadruple that production. But he doesn't call them phone booths. "We're manufacturing quiet spaces and privacy," he said.
Zenbooth is not the only free-standing office phone booth in the game. Companies like Cubicall, Nomad, and TalkBox, among others, are offering up solutions to the modern office's privacy problem.
Sexism (Score:1, Interesting)
> the women-only club and work space The Wing opened . . .
This is sexist.
People would protest a men-only club even though many groups of men have no special access for being male and many women do for being female.
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If I ran a club and said no blacks or Jews allowed I rightfully be chastised.
Actually as distasteful as I believe that to be, I would support your right to freedom of association as guaranteed in the First Amendment. The freedom to associate includes the freedom to not associate. We need to either honor this, or amend the Constitution. The need to defend freedom vastly outweighs my personal tastes and sensibilities, or anyone else's.
It's the same reason cities allow permits for KKK parades and events. Sure they're drastically unpopular but it's understood that censorship usually
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I wonder how successful would be a man suing to be admitted into a women-only college/university or a women-only club. Equal justice under the law?
How do you feel about gym memberships [curves.com]?
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Two person "phone booth" (Score:5, Funny)
Yep, those 2 person soundproof boxes are definitely going to be used for phone calls and nothing else.
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It's actually necessary for the planned Superman reboot in which the title character will be a 600 pound green-haired Puerto Rican quadriplegic trans-woman with celiac disease.
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Still probably a better Superman movie than we've seen for a while.
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Wow, blast from the past. Back in 1978 when the *Superman* movie premiered, my local big-screen theater put a phone book in the lobby with some Clark Kent clothes hanging in it...somebody added a pair of pantyhose.
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No phone? (Score:3)
Then its only relationship to a “phone booth” is the rough dimensions. But I suppose that sounds better than calling it a “half closet”.
So this is how companies who’ve stripped away every vestige of privacy from their employees can pretend to give it back, eh? I bet there are cameras monitoring who goes in, and for how long, though.
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Yep. At my company, the only place you can find actual phones these days (as opposed to the Skype for Business software phone system) is in such phone booths- which are pretty constantly busy 10am-3pm daily. There are signs that say you're not supposed to use them as offices.
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Does the Skype-as-phone work ok within the company? Their webex system is complete crap...
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Yes, most of the time. A few of the overseas calls have gone bad, and every once in a while I need to reboot, but not too terrible. Oh, and I seem to have bandwidth issues over VPN from home- I can use it for screen sharing, voice calling, and IM- Pick Any TWO. Sometimes pick any ONE.
Of course, Skype for Business requires that you're using a well-maintained Exchange Server forest, on VPN, internal to your company network, which does make a difference. I don't use it for outside the system calls, I go to
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"Then its only relationship to a “phone booth” is the rough dimensions."
Exactly, it's just a booth.
I'll patent a horizontal one that people an use to get buried in.
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"Where you see tape, I see walls...
-- Les Nessmen
Pretty sure your contractor could toss up a row of these [google.com] for considerably less that $4K a pop...
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So this is how companies who’ve stripped away every vestige of privacy from their employees can pretend to give it back, eh? I bet there are cameras monitoring who goes in, and for how long, though.
There is no need for cameras or time card machines. Those are surveillance tools from the 90s.
Between the open floor plan and all the glass walls, it's easy to know who is working less 80 hours a week. And yes, you can check your Facebook, do all your Christmas shopping online, play Clash of whatever, play minesweeper, check your stocks, read the news, and watch cat videos, but please do all of that from the phone booths/semi-closets or from the reception / kitchen / play areas. There is even a stationary C
call it by its real use (Score:3)
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The masturbation booth.
It would be a lot more convenient than having to wait for the boss to leave so I can use his office.
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Agent 86 (Score:5, Informative)
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Zenbooth is not the only free-standing office phone booth in the game. Companies like Cubicall, Nomad, and TalkBox, among others, are offering up solutions to the modern office's privacy problem.
A modern day Cone Of Silence.
What?? Could you repeat that?
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From the "Get Smart" secret spy series. For office discussions that were of the highest security classification, the solution was simple - plastic bubbles. Next best thing to SSL encryption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://blogsitestudio.com/wp-... [blogsitestudio.com]
Meh (Score:3)
This feels like a press release, not news.
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They are actually reasonably popular in certain types of companies. We have two with hard walls for a small office, and I wish we could have more. I am also considering just going with 7x6' offices to be able to give more people a private space to work... but it gets expensive.
Phone booth is never coming back (Score:5, Insightful)
As for these new booths, the lack of phone isn't the main difference; it's the fact that they are located in private rather than public spaces. They are not in any way a replacement for phone booths, they are really a replacement for the private office space that disappeared when companies started embracing open-plan offices.
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I'm assuming these clubs are typically very noisy
This.
And a local club used to have a phone booth with selectable background sound recordings. So if that was someplace you were not supposed to be, you could make yourself an alibi.
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This was especially true in the mid 1980s when Reagan de-funded the mental health system, causing a massive increase of chronic, long-term homeless people to be on the streets. Phone booths, which were usable until then, became bathrooms and other spaces. The doors came off, then booths disappeared, just because it didn't help business for a store to have an area constantly smelling of piss.
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Not this Reagan myth again. The ACLU is what is responsible for shutting down the mental health system, starting with cases in the 1970s. They're quite proud of it [aclu.org], for some reason. Apparently having crazy people die on the streets from drugs and exposure is better than having them well-fed, sheltered, and medicated.
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Not this Reagan myth again. The ACLU is what is responsible for shutting down the mental health system, starting with cases in the 1970s. They're quite proud of it [aclu.org], for some reason. Apparently having crazy people die on the streets from drugs and exposure is better than having them well-fed, sheltered, and medicated.
They're proud of it for a few reasons. We have a long history in the US of involuntarily committing non-crazy people who happen to be "different." Gay folks, radicals, imbeciles, and people who are otherwise inconvenient, like rape victims. Care was horrible, and people who had committed no crimes were subject to horrible tortures to try to "fix" their condition. If you're not a physical danger to others in society, there is no constitutionally-justifiable reason to keep someone in a sanitarium against thei
Crime wasn't the cause of the disappearance of pho (Score:1)
Crime wasn't the primary cause of the disappearance of phone booths. Fat people were. Public phone booths used to have a door for privacy, security and reducing noise then the phone companies didnt want to risk getting sued by fat people getting stuck inside them so they removed all the doors. But since public phone booths are commonly found on busy roads you couldnt hear the person you were talking to and the other person couldnt hear you either without that box around you due to the road noise. Of course,
we desperately need (Score:3)
We desperately need these at work.
Alternatives to pissing money away... (Score:5, Insightful)
"...products range from $3,995 (for a standard one-person booth) to $15,995 (for a two-person "executive" booth)"
So, after you destroyed business privacy by embracing the open-floor plan, your answer is to build obscenely priced closets?
Kind of makes you wonder how much it would cost to throw up some drywall and mount some doors and you know, give employees the privacy of an office again.
Or better yet, grow the hell up and learn to properly measure performance and manage employees working remotely. We sure as hell could use a few less million cars on the road every day.
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I currently work in an open floor plan office, and find that this is rarely a problem.
People engaging in a discussion related to work that is disturbing others are encouraged
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Ok, this is getting off topic, but you'd be surprised at how often I'd see "i" or something similar as a variable name. This was on COBOL programs, which are supposed to have long, readable variable names. :p
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On the excuse of "Everybody Does it", consider point #1 [ethicsalarms.com] from ethicsalarms:
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With for(int i=0; i < n; i++), you can tell that 'i' is some sort of counter in the for loop, but what is it actually *USED* for? Its purpose might be obvious on the same line as the for loop, but when the variable is used for something in the body of the loop, it may not not be. Compare it to:
for(int employeenum = 0;employeenum < employee_count; employeenum++)
Naming the variable something representative of what that variable is actually going to be used for ensures that any time that variable
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Then there are arguments on whether employeenum should be int,unsigned int or even uint8_t, whether the coding standard should be EmployeeNum, employee_num, or employeeNum.
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Presumably, the coding standard reflects whatever a majority of the programmers that work there determined it would be in the first place, and a condition of you working there in the first place is that you would abide by the coding standards chosen by the company.
Tends to quell arguments pretty quickly.
You can try and get the coding standards changed, but this would generally require convincing the CTO that such a change would result in more productivity, so you'd need to have an overwhelming amount o
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Oh, and neither is the proper syntax for incrementing a variable, because 'i' is not a proper variable name in the first place.
"i" is indeed the correct variable name for the index into an array (and "j" and "k" for nested indices). Its the convention from math, and is idiomatic - anything else is needlessly confusing. Not that you loop on the index into an array much in modern programming languages. Similarly, "x" and "y" are perfectly fine for variables holding geometric coordinates.
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You grossly overestimate how much money most companies are willing to spend on their employees.
I have *never* worked for a company that was willing to pay for a laptop for me to work from home, and that's including the one job that I had where telecommuting was even possible.
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You grossly overestimate how much money most companies are willing to spend on their employees.
I have *never* worked for a company that was willing to pay for a laptop for me to work from home, and that's including the one job that I had where telecommuting was even possible.
You grossly overestimate what it takes to work remotely. How much horsepower does it really take to run a VPN client and a Remote Desktop client? Could a Raspberry Pi do it? I would likely cost more for a dual-monitor setup, and a "dumb" terminal used to securely connect you to a virtual machine behind a VPN would continue to secure all of the critical company data onsite and NOT on some remote PC.
No office. No cube furniture. No traditional desktop hardware (VMs instead). Reduced office footprint. R
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So, after you destroyed business privacy by embracing the open-floor plan, your answer is to build obscenely priced closets?
Well yes. I'm not sure why you think that sounds strange. The companies where the open floor plan concept have failed are the same which don't provide private areas for situations that need it. Are you surprised that the optimum solution is a balance?
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I'm glad my boss doesn't allow remote work.
Despite everything she claims, on the few occasions I've had a chance to work from home I can't keep my wife from bothering me every 10 minutes. At least when I'm at work I can ignore the text messages while I focus on my job, and headphones keep most of the random office drop-ins at bay.
I guess if I was single it wouldn't be too bad, but I detest having to use a VPN and the upload speeds on home internet make a lot of things painful. Unless work was going to pay for a nice fast connection, docking stations, monitors, etc. I'd rather just go to the office.
How many hours are wasted every month by you sitting behind a steering wheel in traffic, commuting to and from an office every day? A full-time employee with an hour-long commute (not uncommon) equals 40 hours a month wasted. When I was able to work remotely, I also pocketed upwards of $200 a month in gas and vehicle maintenance savings. I also used an hour out of every morning to work out, so it gave me considerable health benefits as well.
When it comes to the productivity gains and happy employees, it'
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"properly measure performance and manage employees working remotely" Like that will ever happen. Yes, I'm bitter about being f*cked over because I work remotely. Top rated employee in my group year over year? Check. Passed over for promotion? Double check. So why the f*ck would I want to work my ass off again? For a measly pittance of a pay raise? uncheck.
If you work for a company that requires that amount of ass-kissing face time in order to be properly recognized, perhaps it's time to work for another company.
In the meantime, remember you could be spending a couple hundred a month on fuel and vehicle maintenance costs to commute 20+ days a week, twice a day. And that doesn't include the reduced stress and health benefits of not dealing with smog-infused traffic every day, or the reduced risk of not becoming one of those 40,000 deaths per year on our roadw
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Better yet, the active shooter instructions at my office say to hide under your desk or take shelter in a conference room. A conference room either made of glass on 4 sides, or an all glass wall on one side.
brilliant..
Sexist shit (Score:5, Insightful)
> women-only club and work space The Wing
Really? People would throw an absolute shit-fit if there was a "men-only club and work space"
How TF is this legal?
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It's legal because you can't make it illegal without making men-only clubs illegal, and some of those have been around for longer than some countries.
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16 grand for a glorified cupboard? (Score:2)
If they are purpose-building / renovating - and it sounds like it, "...were included in the design...", then you would have thought that a competent architect and contractor could have put something together cheaper.
Use the money saved to equip each booth with a secure PC / video conference utility..
Imagined privacy (Score:2)
There is no privacy when it comes to phone conversations, whether or not it's in a "private" room. I'm reminded of the Tim Allen skit, the "soundproof room."
https://youtu.be/J9XhVuoNEe0 [youtu.be]
You may THINK you have privacy in one of those rooms, but you do not.
How is this new? (Score:2)
So? Many otherwise open-plan offices I have worked at in the last decade use to have small rooms for small meetings (such as Scrum), special projects and phone calls.
These were not products dropped into the "landscape"; these had been part of the office's interior design from the start when it had been planned.
You do not have phone calls out in the open shared space -- that is just common sense. Too bad that not enough people have it.
Forget offices... (Score:2)
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Japan has had them for years (Score:2)
Japan has had booths to make phone calls in shared spaces for a long time, because in Japan it is impolite to speak audibly on your phone in such places as airline lounges, trains, etc. I only wish it was similarly socially unacceptable to speak loudly on your phone around other people in Europe or the USA.
These used to be phone booths with payphones. Older structures still have them, newer structures are built with them and signs indicating 'phone zone' or similar.
Meanwhile, how do you phone someone to tal
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We have them (Score:1)
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SafeSpace Boot (Score:1)
Dumb idea (Score:2)