I am a teacher. I share a large office with about 20 other teachers. We each have our own desk and bookshelves, but there are no privacy dividers at all.
However, we also understand that we’re all busy, that Desk Time Is Work Time, and that socialization belongs in the faculty room, not the office. It works. Also, I have a pair of really obvious old-school headphones, and I’m not above putting them on when I’m not listening to music, just to discourage casual contact.
Besides the OP’s focus on office-type environments, the board skews older, so most of us did our shit work when we were younger. There’s also an expectation that working conditions are going to suck when you’re working in a factory or outside or whatever.
Before, I didn’t mention some of my earlier jobs, like the one loading trucks in temperatures from 115ºF (outside the truck that had been sitting in the hot sun all day; inside was probably over 130ºF) to 15ºF (during a particularly cold week for northern California) because a job loading trucks entails doing heavy physical work in an unconditioned environment. Everyone knows that jobs like that are crappy. There’s no surprise there. Just like my dad wouldn’t complain about the smell when he was working at a sewage treatment plant for a couple of years.
If I wanted to go back to the absolute worst working conditions I’ve ever had, I’d go with my mom’s dog-grooming shop. Because of the dryers, even with air conditioning it got really hot in the summer. And you’re wearing non-breathable clothes because those materials keep the little bits of cut dog hair from penetrating and turning the cloth into miniature porcupine spines over every square inch of your body, so you’re pretty much always bathed in sweat. The material doesn’t stop the hair from sticking itself into the creases of your elbows or fingers, penetrating random pores, and generally irritating any unprotected areas.
Dogs and cats shit and piss randomly, sometimes while you’re drying them so that it splatters all over the table, the animal you’re dealing with, and/or other animals next to them. They bite too, sometimes, so you always have to be careful and aware that you might be injured by the animal you’re working on. The expression from impacted anal glands is the single most disgusting smell outside of a rotting dead body I’ve ever had to deal with.
The animals are also supremely uncooperative. Imagine trying to give a bath and a haircut to a hyperactive 4 year old kid who also has a tendency to bite. Or shit on the table. For added fun, imagine that it’s either hands or preferably YOUR FACE that he likes to bite. That’s a little bit like what dealing with some of the more ill-behaved dogs is like.
If you’re on bathing duty, you’re spending 6–10 hours a day with your hands immersed in water. In the winter, you’ll sometimes have chapped skin so bad that the skin around your knuckles cracks and bleeds. The tub we had was elevated, but dogs vary so much in size, and the tub itself can’t be adjusted, so half the time you’re hunched over. Do that for a couple of hours and you start getting a back ache. Do it for 10–12 hours during the Christmas rush and you’d be willing to beat the shit out of any random person on the street if you could make your back feel better by doing so.
But you know what? Being a dog groomer is not considered to be a job with an expectation of decent working conditions. You know that it’s going to be hot, stinky, unpleasant, you’re going to be standing all day, and probably going to have numerous minor injuries on a daily basis. You don’t go into it thinking that you’re going to have a place to sit, maybe some privacy, and some autonomy to work on your responsibilities while listening to your iPod and drinking some coffee. Which is why most people weren’t bringing up the kinds of jobs that you know without even explaining will suck like a Tijuana whore at a donkey show.
The one I remarked about and the one I have now do involve sitting at a desk most of the time, but I’ve also been a lab tech (both RnD and QC) and a TA (science tutoring, Orgo lab). I had lab jobs where the situation / company / coworkers were hostile, but the labs themselves were always adequate. Most of the factories I’ve worked in as a tech or visited as part of my consulting job looked dirty to people who’d never worked in a factory; some of them were dirty by factory-worker standards; but none of them was as noisy as that basement where nobody gets any storage space, nobody has an assigned desk, and half of the people in the room spend all day yelling at their phones’ pickup microphones.
I work in a cube city with no windows and it doesn’t bother me.
It’s usually too hot, though, even with my little mini-fan blowing in my face. There have been days I’ve planned to work OT but ended up leaving at the normal time because I was too uncomfortable to stay.