US Worker Bees Toil in Cubicles
美国公司白领对办公环境叫苦不迭
Every day, and certainly on Sunday when many newspapers produce a separate comics section, millions of Americans check out the strip called “Dilbert,” created by cartoonist Scott Adams. It satirizes worklife in white-collar offices, particularly those in which people toil in confined spaces called “cubicles.”
每一天,尤其是在周日的时候，许多报纸会为读者奉上一个单独的漫画栏目,数百万的美国人会意犹未尽的享受由漫画家斯科特?亚当斯创造的这个被称为“呆伯特”的漫画。它专门讽刺位于狭窄空间内,人们俗称“一人占一坑”的办公室白领阶层。
Fortune magazine, which writes about the people who make, well, a fortune, once focused on average "worker bees” in the corporate world who sit inside these "modules," as they're called, separated by partitions, at built-in desks with eye-level shelves, all easily interchangeable. The movable walls are designed to give workers at least a tad of privacy.
财富杂志曾写报道过那么多的人发迹,而这一次却将注意力集中在当下世界公司里的“工蜂”们，这类人坐在被称为“独立单元”的办公区域。当中内置书桌和与眼同高的置物架轻易可互换位置。而移动墙的设计初衷是给工人们增加至少一点点隐私。
As Fortune lays out the story, Robert Propst, a young industrial designer in the Midwest state of Michigan, dreamed up the office cubicle in 1968.
财富杂志讲的这个故事,罗伯特?普罗斯特，一位年轻的密歇根州中西部设计师，在1968年空想出了这种办公室结构，并使其变为现实。
Soon office mazes, or "cubicle farms," sprouted everywhere. It seemed like everyone below the rank of vice president soon worked in one of these office boxes, identical to the next one save for the photos of the family and dog.
很快这种办公室迷宫,或“小室格局”将会发芽生根无处不在。看起来每个职位像副总统的人很快就会在这样一间办公室中工作，和隔壁屋子相同的设置是都有家人和狗的照片。
Today, cubicles are ridiculed - even loathed - as symbols of conformity, their inhabitants as clones and drones. Even the privacy part didn't work, as workers cannot help but overhear their colleagues' conversations and phone calls.
今天,这种办公室布局风格被人厌恶甚至嘲笑作为符号的统一,其居民是一直忍辱负重。隐私部分甚至没办法让人工作,员工不得不听同事们的对话和电话内容。
Lots of people, including cartoonist Adams, have tried to humanize the sterile cubicle. In real life, he’s even designed what he calls the "ultimate cubicle," which would allow occupants to vary the flooring and lighting. They can even add a fish tank. But a box is still a box.
很多人,包括漫画家亚当斯,都试图让这种办公室格局更加人性化。而在现实生活中,他甚至设计出一种“终极工作间”，这将允许使用者可以享受不同的地板和照明，甚至可以增加一个鱼缸。但是盒子终归是盒子，不管人们如何装饰，终究也无法摆脱。
Before he died in 2000, Bob Propst, the father of the cubicle, told friends he was sorry, all his days, that he’d unleashed the idea on the world. He called his invention an act of "monolithic insanity.”
直到2000年去世前,这种办公室格局的缔造者罗伯特?普罗斯特,告诉他的朋友自己感到很难过,在他不多的日子里,他会致力于向全世界传达这种思想，他称自己的发明是“整体的疯狂。” |