Cube Privacy Via Gibberish

fury88 writes "CNN is running a story on a new device created by Herman Miller to help with lack of privacy in the cube life. It's apparently a device that will spit out gibberish when you are talking on the phone. You record a few words as instructed by the device and when you are having conversations that may be private, it will spit out sounds that sound like a clone of yourself all talking at once. Frankly I have to think this would be annoying after awhile. As if dealing with your project manager sitting next to you wasn't enough, now you get to hear several versions of your Project Manager talking at once. Talk about insanity!"

Comments

Only for cubes?

[AndroidCat]

Could they make a portable one for people's cell phones? There are some calls that I'd rather not hear even half of. (As Ren and Stimpy would put it, "Repugnant, yet strangely compelling".)

Re:There are headphones that cancel noise

[frdmfghtr]

Imagine some big rectangular pieces of some material that doesn't transfer sound (or does it badly) and place them between cubicles. Ideally those pieces should reach from the floor to the ceiling of the room with you cubicle. Now your privacy should be okay.

Those are called "offices." Some time ago, when you got an office job with a large company, you were assigned one of these "offices" to do your work. They even had these other novel things called "doors" which were like small wall sections on hinges that could be swung in and out of the opening used to go into and out of the "office." Imagine, your own space where the walls extended from the floor all the way to the ceiling, and a door to boot! These were popular in times where one also would frequently work for the same company for a long time and get additional perks such as "health care" and this other neat thing called a "pension" where the company continued to pay part of your salary after you worked for them for thirty or so years and stopped working, called "retirement."

(Yes, that is sarcasm you smell)

Just a thought...

[mark-t]

Don't carry on a private conversation with someone while at work in the first place.

But then my sympathy for people that expect the "right" to make or accept personal calls at work in the first place is somewhere in the vicinity of zero anyways.

If the conversation is work-related and still needs to be private, then one has a perfectly legitimate reason to have access to a telephone in a more private area than one's cubicle anyways. If the conversation isn't work related, one just has to bite the bullet and accept the fact that there is no reason why they should be afforded the luxury of increased privacy for such an activity. If they _REALLY_ need increased privacy for a personal call, they can ask their boss to see if he'll allow it. If personal calls are infrequent enough and the reason is legitimate, even if not work-related, they may permit it anyways.