‘The office’ has been a concept that has produced mixed reactions since they first became widely used in the late 19th Century. While they have provided a place, to meet with like-minded people and focus on the tasks at hand, there have long been suggestions and speculation that they are more about control of the workers than being a functioning workplace., Regardless of whether it was the cubicle farms popular throughout the 1980s, to the open-plan offices that largely replaced them, ‘The Office’ has long been two words that were synonymous with, drudgery and a place to escape from. This was reflected in popular culture too. We only need to watch Keanu Reeves navigating to freedom through the maze of his office at the behest of a strange voice on the phone in, The Matrix, or watch the grind of the office-based work day sent up in comedies such as Office Space to see this. Both of these films were made in 1999 and perhaps reflected the suffocation many were feeling at the end of the last millennium, and also the uncertainty, about what it should be replaced with. Of course, the series ‘The Office’ was one of the few sitcoms that managed to be successful in the UK and then translated well in the US. Its comedy lay in the, barely contained yearnings of the inhabitants to be elsewhere doing something else. Shots of photocopiers churning out useless sheets of paper and zoned out workers staring into the mid-distance at, their desks expertly conveyed the collective ennui. Its transatlantic success showed that even in two countries divided by a common language, we all share in the office’s frustrations and challenges..

Reordering exercise

由
列印
嵌入

排行榜

視覺風格

選項

切換範本

恢復自動保存: ?