This is definitely one of the worst things the 90s brought us. In the early 1990s, the boss of one of the most prominent ad agencies in the world (Chiat/Day) had a flash of inspiration. It seemed to him that "the conventional American office structure was antiquated and counterproductive." In response, he invented what quickly became a scourge upon the 1990s-era American workplace: hoteling.

 

Hoteling (also known as "hot-desking" I guess because it sounds sexier) is the practice by which an office doesn't have assigned desks. It's first come, first served. Sounds simple, right? Too bad it was one of the worst things ever inflicted upon American office workers. (And that's a long list.)

 

Chiat's crackpot dream was modeled on the college campus. In his mind, a campus has no formal workspaces, and yet a lot of work gets done. Of course this overlooks the fact that at college, the work of students gets done when they go home and work at their desks. And the work of professors gets done in their traditional-style offices. 

 

Chiat was wrong in his conception, and his scheme was a failure from the first trial employee (who described her experience as "a bad dream"). But that didn't stop him from rolling it out to his entire company. Soon, upper management everywhere had caught this fevered dream of increased productivity based (weirdly) upon decreased personal space and security.

 

The only thing hoteling really accomplished was to communicate further instability to your workforce. Mass corporate layoffs began to surge in the 1990s. After seeing all of your colleagues laid off, jobs being outsourced by the thousands, and being subjected to the indignity of cubicles, being told that you can't even have a cubicle of your own was the final insult.  

 

(And you couldn't help noticing that the people responsible for making the decision to convert the office to hoteling did not, themselves, hotel. Oh no: they all had offices of their own. The message ["you are an anonymous cog"] was all too clear.)

 

The appeal of hoteling to upper management was clear. Because it was more space-efficient, you didn't need as many desks or computers. It beckoned with its promise of a clean, empty floor, like something straight out of an Ikea catalog, free from the annoying clutter and kitty pictures and Dilbert comics that accumulate on proper desks. And if it was completely dehumanizing, impersonal, and ignorant of the human need for stability and territory, so what? Just hire some more.