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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!"
Almost everyone has a cell phone. When I need privacy at work, I just walk out of the building and talk on my cell. Scrambling my voice would be annoying to me and to my coworkers.
To add a feature, any time you do math, it starts yelling out random numbers too add security:
8! 23! 42! 5432!
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The idea behind it isn't to stop people from listening in on private conversations, but rather to put people in a suitable mood. The latter tends to mean "willing to shop" in department stores, which I would guess is the main use of it.
Personally, I hate the idea behind this. Either it doesn't work, in which case it is annoying as hell, or it does work, in which case it's, if not unethical at least provocative (to me, YMMV).
But what I hate even more is that a lot of public places thought that playing "mood music" was a generally good idea without any other thought behind it. Stop polluting my ears now, please!
Also, Muzak has a website that is even more annoying than their sound pollution. Use at your own risk. (No, I won't provide a link. I hate them.)
Switch on the Tourette's Syndrome option to liven things up.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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)
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?