When I was little, my father would take my sister and me to his office in the Loop on Saturdays. While Dad collected his Saturday mail and checked his messages (this was before e-mail), Lucy and I would Xerox our hands and play with the Coke fountain, eat his secretary’s mints and run our hands over the pumps she kept in the bottom drawer of her file cabinet.

This quiet office was a world at rest—an off-hours preview of the workplace we’d know as grown-ups. And as an adult, my own working world is a lot like my dad’s office, but not in the way I expected it to be. I work at a giant multinational company, one that employs nearly a thousand people in our New York office alone. But from Monday through Friday, the place is often nearly as quiet as my father’s empty law offices on those weekends twenty years ago.

People simply don’t speak out loud too often in my office, and I don’t think this is rare. Communication is done online, so we’re never on the phone. And instead of gossiping with one another around the coffee machine, most of us are chatting with our friends on AOL or Gmail, reading Gawker or shopping. As a boy, I was expecting the rhythmic typewriters and chummy, chatty colleagues of How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying or maybe the tough-guy, locker room atmosphere of Wall Street; what I got instead is more akin to the scenes in 2001 before the computer takes over.

The culture of the office is in the middle of a long demise. Long before e-mail made face-to-face communication almost completely unnecessary, phones and fax machines started to keep us apart. But GChat and the current downturn have accelerated these changes. A notable trend in this Great Recession is the elimination of benefits across industries, which translates to a de-facto elimination of full-time employment. In the future, some analysts predict, we’ll all be contract workers. An all-freelance workforce armed with Blackberries and iPads means no more Cartier watches on your 15th anniversary with the company, no Morgan Stanley Corporate Challenge runs though Central Park, no more drinks with the department when you cross the finish line.

I doubt the office will ever disappear, but its foundational place in the American culture and economy has been threatened. This anxiety about the death of the office is reflected in a new kind of office story, in literature and on television. These are not just tales that happen to take place in an office—not 30 Rock, for instance, or older ensemble shows like Newsradio or Wings, which are defined by the industry in which they take place. These are pieces about the office, where the primary character is the workplace itself.

Jonathan Ferris’s Then We Came To The End from 2007 is perhaps the most notable recent office novel. TWCTE, the story of an ad agency collapsing during the 2000-2001 recession, gained attention for its first-person-plural narrative, which connects the reader with the collective voice of the office. Because it takes place during a period of lay offs, the scope of the voice shrinks throughout the book, even as it chatters on about all the little intrigues and pranks that make the day go faster.

Ferris criticizes the drudgery of the corporate workplace, but in the gentlest way. The novel is far more committed to showing how sweet the office can be. At the agency in TWCTE, all crushes are eventually requited, all gossips are eventually shamed, all the employees really do respect the boss. There are dark clouds in the novel—cancer, kidnapping, a recession—but they are notable for being not of work; disorder is the abject of the office. To Ferris, it’s a place where corporate politesse creates a peace that might not always be comfortable, but is more or less welcoming to all.

Only eulogies are ever so sunny. By contrast, the characters in Office Space, the 1999 cult movie from the nineties boom, are driven so mad by their coworkers and bosses that they gleefully defraud their employer, revel in debilitating injuries that keep them from work, and eventually burn the place down. Less than a decade later, after one recession and on the edge of another, TWCTE caters much more gently to an audience of workers unsettled by recent economic earthquakes. Ferris’s boss is stern but maternal, rather than capricious and cruel; his workers are caring and curious, not petty and destructive.

That likeable, accidental community, is also represented in the British and American versions of The Office. Where TWCTE brings the reader into the fold with an expansive narrative voice, The Office uses archetypes. Its characters are painted with strokes broad enough to make them recognizable and loveable to anyone: the horrid boss, the cute boy, the sniveling sycophant (and, in the American version, the gay one, the fat one, the Ivy Leaguer, et cetera).

But the core of The Office is just as soft—and just as elegiac—as that of TWCTE. Take Tim’s closing speech in the last episode of the British version, in which he finally wins over Dawn, the receptionist whom he’s loved throughout the series:

The people you work with are people you were just thrown together with. You know, you don’t know them, it wasn’t your choice, and yet you spend more time with them then you do your friends or your family. But probably all you’ve got in common is the fact that you walk around on the same bit of carpet for 8 hours a day. And so, obviously, when someone comes in who you… you have a connection with… yeah. And Dawn was a ray of sunshine in my life and it meant a lot. But, if I’m really being honest I never really thought it would have a happy ending. I don’t know what a happy ending is. Life isn’t about endings, is it? It’s a series of moments.

In spite of himself, Tim comes to the conclusion that the office really is where life—that “series of moments”—takes place. He thinks of his experience in his own office as one in which he’s thrown together with people he doesn’t know in a place that he didn’t really choose. That sounds more like the human condition than just a corporate workplace. And yet, it’s where he eventually found love and, after some struggle, a kind of happiness.

When I saw this episode, I found myself crying for an embarrassingly long time after it finished. This kind of talk is enough to make any junior associate dampen his lapel. Just as TWCTE was an elegy of sorts, so is The Office: it’s no accident, after all, that both versions of this show take place at a paper company, that former staple of corporate life made obsolete by digital innovation (not to mention the reams of blank pages on which the viewer can write themselves into the story). Indeed, in this season corporate austerity measures threaten the whole organization.

The Office is still running new episodes in the US, but it has begun to feel old. Mad Men, even though it takes place 40 years ago, is far more current. Nearly every desk jockey in the United States harbors some kind of fantasy life that involves the just-barely repressed copywriters and art directors depicted in Mad Men. Beneath its cool (and beautiful) exterior, the show gleefully criticizes the iniquities of the post-war period. We laughed at the woeful treatment of the secretaries in the show, and gasped heartily at the boss’s blackface routine. How disgusting, how uncouth—how unprofessional!

But those who work in glass towers shouldn’t throw stones. A little over a year ago, just down the block from us, Salomon Smith Barney disappeared in an afternoon. One day, the courtyard where we’d eat sandwiches from Pret-A-Manger was full of handsome young bankers; the next, they were all gone. It was like Brigadoon but with assholes. Those young investment bankers were as victimized by their own irresponsible behavior, their own reckless office culture as the characters of Mad Men are, or will surely be when the series turns the time machine up to 1969.

The characters in Mad Men might behave badly, but the show’s reverence and nostalgia for the workplace of the 60’s is so profound that it borders on fetishism. The show’s production design has rightfully drawn praise for its obsessive detail; everything at Sterling Cooper is just right, down to the Eames office chairs, the period coffee machines, and the secretaries’ amazing dresses. It’s a museum of work, an office recreated by those who really care—and in this way, Mad Men is just as loving and misty-eyed as TWCTE and The Office.

In reflecting on this trend, I was surprised by the types of people who were putting out these wistful office stories. After all, shouldn’t novelists and screenwriters and improvisational actors hate the corporate workplace? Shouldn’t they have nothing but venom for bosses and hierarchies and receptionists? Perhaps it becomes harder to hate something when you see it slipping away—especially something so central to our culture. In the midst of all this, it’s essential to point out, repeatedly, if necessary, what we’d gain if we lost the office. More personal time, more autonomy. And who would miss running out the door every morning at 7, staying late on deadline, trying to stay awake through meetings, or kowtowing to the CEO?

Together, these little disturbances that define our work lives aren’t so little when they start to stack up. Boarding the elevator this morning, I realized that today was roughly my third anniversary at my current job which means that I have trudged through the lobby and up to my cubicle something like 750 times. That kills me. I think of my friends who are making movies or going to graduate school or traveling, living various, active lives, while I’ve been riding up and down in an elevator a few hundred times. If you stay in the same office, three years can pass by in an afternoon.

Further, while offices throw strangers together in close quarters—which is good for the individual and for the republic—it also diminishes their personhood. This is a simple function of the fact that office workers are the foot soldiers of the service economy. One’s success relies on one’s ability to see people not as complete human beings but as parts of an audience, a market, a demo. We wind up doing the same thing to each other—sorting out and learning all there is to know about the pertinent bits, while leaving the rest alone. This phenomenon is so essential to the contemporary workplace that Melville wrote about it in Bartleby The Scrivener, maybe the first piece of modern office literature. For the narrator, Bartleby exists to work, period. The moment he refuses to work he becomes strange, his humanity is suddenly present, but in a pitiable, diminished way. How is Bartleby to be understood when he refuses to do the one thing he’s suppose to? In the giant machinery of capitalism, a cog that refuses to turn has no reason to exist.

For these reasons, I can’t align myself with the characters in The Office. or TWCTE, and embrace my workplace as the centerpiece of my life. I may spend most of my waking hours there, but it’s not where I spend most of my thinking, or feeling. If I lost the office, I doubt I’d lose my sense of self.

So while I may get a little teary watching that last episode of The Office, it’s worth noting that when I watch it now, I’m watching it under duress. In a less threatening economy, I wonder if my reaction would be the same. It might be—economic scars are emotional scars. Take those who grew up during the Great Depression, who always saved as though a new crash was just around the corner (it was, incidentally). Maybe Great Recession will have a similar effect on how people like me approach our work— making the myth of the benevolent office the only American institution that emerges from the downturn stronger than before.

The Company Way

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