ABSTRACT
It was the summer of 1979, and I had just joined the staff at the National Science Foundation, where I was the new Program Director for Social and Developmental Psychology. As the most junior program director in my division, I was – naturally! – assigned to the smallest and least attractive office. Since I was a member of the professional-level staff, it was a private office with a window, but those were the office’s only amenities. It was long and thin, and, when the necessary filing cabinets and bookshelves were in place, there was not much room to move around. The carpet was dingy, and the walls were badly in need of a fresh coat of paint. The view from the only window, too, was quite dismal: it looked directly at the blank wall of the building next door, which was separated from the NSF building by a narrow alley. My office was located near the copy room, so there was the ‘chunk-chunk-chunk’ of copies being made all day long. The fluorescent lights gave off an unpleasant greenish light, and were so glaring that I often left them off altogether. Perhaps worst of all, the room was located at the very end of the cooling and heating ductwork. As a result, the thermometer on my desk regularly recorded temperatures of over 85° F. It was so hot that I had to place a fan on my desk and work directly in its cooling stream of air; whenever I moved outside this artificial breeze, I began to drip perspiration onto whatever documents I was handling at the moment. And in the winter, opposite conditions prevailed: temperatures rarely rose above 60°F, and my fingers literally turned blue as I attempted to type all the government forms that were a basic part of my job. There was little or no air flow, so the office smelled slightly stale and smoky all the time.
