home office | iHeartBerlin.de

The Soothing Sound of Office Background Noise for Your Home Office

So, how do you enjoy your 4th week of home office so far? It’s awfully quiet, isn’t it? Who would have thought, that of all the things you would miss about going to work is the everyday ruffling and shuffling of your more or less annoying coworkers and the sound of your copy machine. But it’s true, at home it can be so quiet you’ll eventually hear the walls crack. What would you do to hear the totally fake laugh of Karen from accounting that she performs for you not-that-funny boss? Or the annoying passive-aggressive deep breaths by IT guy fixing someone else’s computer for the millionth time. Ah, what a joy a day in the office can be, you may think, slurping your coffee giving someone else the pleasure of typical office background noise.

But you don’t have to miss out on this any longer. Berlin creative agency The Kids came up with the perfect solution: An easy-to-use website that generates typical office background sounds on a loop. You can even specify the number of co-workers and activate certain objects such as a water dispenser and a ping-pong table. You can simply try it out yourself at imissmyoffice.eu and press the play button in the lower-left corner. You’ll never have to miss your own office ever again (at least not for lack of background noise).

by Frank | Design

The Quarantine Diaries: Gardener of the House

Normally, he is the gardener of the house. I watched him year after year, half paying attention. Seeds, coconut-husk soil; add water and in a few months boom… Chilis. Too many to consume. Habaneros, Thai, Jalapenos, Scotch Bonnets. The heat lamp has been set for a few hours in the evenings, on an automatic timer. Every day it clicks on and off. I think maybe I will go mad. I think maybe this is a gift. In our apartment, I set up to work at our dining room table. It’s not the most comfortable set up. The hard chair cuts the blood flow, just above my knees.

One conference call has ended and tasks have been assigned. We have no idea when we will meet in the office again as a team. The dates keep changing. The company provides status updates, the chains of command feign bold ignorance. We’re never quite sure of what is happening at the top, that’s just how it is. They leave that part out of the marketing campaigns and new hire information packets. We are the masses, with seemingly no control. I look over at the seedlings. If I don’t water them, they will surely die, but how much water is too much? I have no direction and no green thumb. Instead, I have an internal lie detector, razor-sharp detachment skills, and Google.

Read on…

by Guest Author | Pandemic, Stories