GLASS HOUSES

posted by James Reel

    The Big Boss here at KUAT is campaigning to beautify and professionalize the appearance of the spaces where civilians are likely to pass by, including the corridor that skirts the KUAT-FM booth and the radio newsroom. As of yesterday, beautification and professionalization have come to mean, in part, opening the vertical blinds that shield us from the gaze of passersby. This is fine with me; I started opening the blinds during my shift a few weeks ago. Since all the work spaces were shifted around during the big remodeling in the 1990s, the FM booth hasn’t had a window to the outside world. True, when we were positioned along an exterior wall, our sole window was way up just below the ceiling (our floor is half underground) and looked out upon a typical UA red brick wall, with a fringe of greenery along the bottom. But it was something. Now, with the blinds open, I can look out into the corridor in front of me, which doesn’t produce any natural light, but at least it does reduce the claustrophobia.
    Naturally, some employees are not happy with this decision. One guy used to be harrassed by a stalker, and he’d prefer not to be on display should the malefactor ever return. Another hates the way people make monkey faces as they pass by on the other side of the glass. Yes, that can be annoying, but I’ve found that over the past few weeks those people have gotten used to the open blinds during my shift, and now all I get is the occasional friendly wave. (The sole remaining offender is my immediate supervisor, a notorious prankster.) As for students and other strangers walking down the hall, they do everything they can to avoid eye contact, although many of them are legitimately curious about what a radio station looks like.
    I probably have far fewer problems being on display than most of the other people around here. Radio is a very private profession; we speak to thousands of people, but we do it in physical isolation. Me, between my two stints in the radio biz I spent several years working at the morning paper, in a big open newsroom similar to what you see in movies like All the President’s Men. There’s no privacy at all in such places, and there’s always somebody sitting six feet away from you, not even in a separate cubicle, who can see and hear everything you’re up to. You get used to it, and start to ignore each other’s activities, or stop caring that you’re surrounded by potential eavesdroppers. Here at the radio station, we continue to have a measure of privacy insofar as a double-pane window still separates us from co-workers and gawkers. I predict that most of my colleagues will get used to the new open-blinds policy in a couple of weeks. The toughest thing will be remembering not to scratch themselves in an unseemly way.