I’m fighting the urge to scream right now.
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Go away, baitin’
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Locked in
Screaming
Which side is the lock on?
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Nothing equivalent for customers? The world needs Amazon escape rooms.
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Oh, i dunno, this is well within the purview of a Black Mirror episode but i agree otherwise. It’s like we have all the corporate malfeasance and inhumanity of a vintage Gibson novel but none of the cool tech like corporate owned space elevators and space hotels (not yet anyway). It’s the beige dystopia! Toiling away in an underground Bezos warehouse for the chance to spend five minutes in a screaming booth.
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I saw something almost identical at a company in Sweden a few years back. It was an office setting without cubical or office walls. So set out throughout the facility were these little boxes, just like the ones described here, but made of wood (it’s Sweden, so of course!). With enough room for two people to sit. A phone, a plant, a chair, a shelf big enough for a laptop, etc.
The main function was to give a place to have conversations without the din of office life. One on one meetings, phone calls, conference calls. When you don’t need a whole conference room, but need some temporary isolation for office noise. They were also available for breaks.
I work(ed) for a Chinese company that has office employees lined up in rows, not that dissimilar from this place in Sweden, but even more cramped. It can get loud and become difficult to have an important discussion with your boss or make a phone call. So these little boxes seemed awesome for us as well. But we never implemented them.
So don’t dismiss these silly boxes if they might be helpful at your own office. They could be the right tool for the problem.
These Amazon boxes may have been inspired by similar boxes. But they don’t seem to be placed or used quite the same. I’m less inclined to dismiss them outright as dumb, but am a bit dubious.
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Of course little rooms like that are a nice break from an open office. That might be less that they’re not a sign of corporate dystopia, though, and more that open offices are hell inflicted on workers.
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Yeah, no. Silent screaming cubicles are not the answer to Amazon’s employees’ problems.
♬ Kumbaya, my board. ♫ /s
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I was just thinking it looks like a Porta-Potty.
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I agree. Yet the office in Sweden seemed rather nice. It wasn’t crowded, but the boxes helped when a bit more privacy was needed. The office in China was and is pretty dystopian by Western standards, but workers there were genuinely perplexed when I’d say anything about it. That’s why I couldn’t get traction on the boxes.
As I said, I’m a bit dubious about Amazon’s implementation as described. But repeating what you quoted from me, don’t dismiss these if they might be helpful at your office. If they are not the right tool for you, then they aren’t. But just because Amazon is using them badly (silent scream cubicles as you say) doesn’t mean they can’t be used correctly elsewhere. Heck, as a quiet spot to make a phone call on a loud manufacturing floor without having to head all the way to a break room and hope it’s unoccupied would make a closet size box invaluable to a lot of people seeking a quite corner to make a private call.
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I worked at a place that had these at one point and they were so popular that they ended up policing them to kick people out if they appeared to be out of a call and or just working in there. But at least they weren’t pretending they were some kind of mental health tool.
More just exactly as you said: an open office full of “first come first serve” seating is basically an upper level of hell.
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“Black folks never take anything seriously” is a valid assessment of the fact that we can find hilarity in almost anything—even in our own traumas—and we often do it as a way to just be able to get through the day.
Reading this made me wish filmmakers could find a balance between trauma porn and reflecting the humanity of our ancestors without it being twisted into the false supremacist narrative that people enjoyed being enslaved.
ETA: With the pandemic and political crises, maybe these cubicles could become the new corner phone booths… 
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These are just so that Amazon employees can self-identify as “about to go over the edge” so they can proactively fire them. No point in having them go berserk at work and cause delays - they can do it at home or in the unemployment office. That’s just sound business!
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Just great! I went in for a quick break, and now I don’t know where or when I’m at!
And forget trying to light a match when you’re done…
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Silly rabbits. Haven’t you noticed that no one ever comes out?
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After a few days? Just think of some airplane washrooms after just a five hour flight!
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Give it time.
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