Each employee has a desk, and maybe some supporting storage or seating, on the open floor--even CEO Don Katz. It's like an old-fashioned newspaper city room. Except that there are no window offices.

Instead, a series of glass-walled meeting rooms line the windowed perimeter. The rooms come in different sizes, from big conference rooms to individual "phone booths," as Audible calls them, where employees can retreat for a private one-on-one or telephone conversation.

Meanwhile, light from the exterior windows flows through the glass walls into the central office space.

Once upon a time I worked in a newspaper city room. There were no partitions between departments, not even a tall file cabinet to hunker behind.

You developed a sense of intimacy within the space you occupied. A bubble of privacy, a kind of Gardol Shield (Baby Boomers will remember those Colgate toothpaste ads). Or maybe just a Mr. Magoo myopia.

In those days everyone hammered away at IBM electric typewriters. A few old-timers stubbornly pecked at their manuals. The electrics had motors that would dolefully drone at you when you stopped typing long enough to think. So thinking was not recommended.

The hum of those motors also produced a clacking like drumming fingers as you tried to gather your thoughts or flipped through the chicken scratch in your notebook in search of some lifesaving quote (if you found it, the life you saved was your own). This was part of your initiation into the ranks of what could still be called the ink-stained wretches.

The blocked writer had a recourse if the words wouldn't flow. That was to rip the sheet of paper viciously out of the typewriter, producing a mechanical squeal that was as satisfying in its way as one of Pete Townshend's slashing, defiant final guitar chords.

And you still had the satisfaction of ostentatiously crumpling the paper and flinging it in the vicinity of the wastebasket.

As W.C. Fields once said, "Ah, those were the days, may they never return."