CHICAGO — The centrally located glass-walled conference room at the Chicago offices of mid-sized software firm Meridian Analytics has, per an internal review conducted quietly over the past six months, been used almost exclusively as a place for individual employees to briefly enter, close the door, and pass gas in private.
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The room, referred to by staff as the fishbowl due to its floor-to-ceiling glass walls facing the open-plan bullpen, was designed by the company’s architects in 2022 as a premium collaborative space intended for cross-functional brainstorming, client presentations, and, per the original design brief, “high-visibility creative energy.”
It has, per the review, hosted seven meetings in the past year.
It has, per the same review, been booked 4,400 times.
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“The room is heavily used,” said office manager Priya Kothari. “It is heavily booked. We just — until we ran the audit — we didn’t fully understand what people were booking it for.“
The audit, conducted by cross-referencing calendar bookings against badge-in data and internal camera footage, revealed a consistent pattern: employees, most commonly between 10:15 and 11 a.m. and again between 2 and 3:30 p.m., would book the fishbowl for periods of two to eleven minutes, enter the room alone, close the door, remain motionless for the duration of the booking, and then leave.
No calls were made. No laptops were opened. No brainstorming was documented.
“They just, like, stand in there,” Kothari said. “Sometimes they sit in the chair. Sometimes they look at their phone. But mostly they just, like — they just stand. And then they leave. And they seem, honestly, a lot more relaxed on the way out than they did on the way in.”
The room, per Kothari, has been booked under a wide range of pretextual meeting titles. Common examples include:
Sync (booked 340 times, no attendees other than the booker)
1:1 (booked 240 times, no second attendee)
Deep work (booked 180 times)
Focus block (booked 140 times)
Thinking (booked 90 times)
Personal (booked 41 times, no elaboration)
And, in one particularly candid instance, just a minute please (booked once, by a senior VP, on a Tuesday morning in March, immediately following the office chili cookoff).
The audit found that 94% of fishbowl bookings involved a single individual entering the room alone.
Of those single-occupant bookings, 100% involved no visible work activity.
Of those, an estimated 87% involved what Kothari described as “a slight, but visible, physical shift in posture approximately thirty to ninety seconds after the door closes.”
She was asked what she meant.
“You know,” she said.
She was asked to be more specific.
“They release,” she said.
The pattern, per Kothari, has been consistent across every level of the organization. Junior analysts book the fishbowl. Senior directors book the fishbowl. Members of the executive team book the fishbowl. One senior VP, per calendar data, has booked the fishbowl every single business day for the past fourteen months, always under the title strategy.
He has, per Kothari, never once actually done strategy in the fishbowl.
He has, per Kothari, done a lot of other things.
The finding has prompted what Meridian’s chief people officer, Randall Cusimano, described as “a broader conversation about the physical needs of a modern workforce.”
“We designed the office for collaboration,” Cusimano said. “For openness. For, quote, the free exchange of ideas. What we did not, in retrospect, design for was, quote, the free exchange of anything else. Because we did not build enough enclosed private spaces, our employees have collectively identified the fishbowl — the one enclosed room in the entire office — as the space where a person can go and briefly be, in the technical sense, alone with themselves. We understand this now. We are not proud of it. But we understand it.”
He paused.
“They needed a bathroom,” he added. “They just needed more bathrooms. And instead we gave them a glass room in the middle of the office and called it collaborative.“
The Meridian bathrooms, per employees interviewed for this article, are widely regarded as insufficient for anything beyond the strict bare minimum of bathroom use. There are, per the office layout, three single-occupancy bathrooms serving 340 employees. The waits are long. The acoustics are poor. The doors, per one employee, “do not close all the way, and everyone knows it.”
The fishbowl, by contrast, offers total privacy, a lockable door, floor-to-ceiling walls, and enough visible activity from the outside — a person standing, a person sitting, a person looking at their phone — to plausibly deny that anything else is happening.
“You can look busy,” said one anonymous employee, a mid-level product manager who has booked the fishbowl 47 times in the past six months. “You can hold a pen. You can pretend to type. Meanwhile, you are actually, in real time, addressing the situation. And nobody outside can tell. Because it’s a glass room. Because the glass is transparent. Because they can see that you are, from all visual indications, working.“
She paused.
“It has changed my life,” she added.
Not every employee, per the audit, has responded to the pattern in the same way. Junior employees, per one interview, tend to book the fishbowl for shorter durations and appear more visibly anxious about the discovery of what they are doing. Senior employees, per the same interview, book longer durations and appear, in the words of one witness, “not to care at all.”
One senior manager, sources confirmed, has been observed removing his suit jacket upon entering the fishbowl, hanging it on the back of a chair, and then, per witnesses, “just going for it.”
He has done this, per calendar data, approximately fourteen times.
He has never, per calendar data, done any strategy.
Meridian has, per Cusimano, begun exploring solutions. The company is considering installing two additional bathrooms in the Q3 renovation, converting the fishbowl into a genuinely enclosed private space with opaque walls, or, per one internal proposal, “just leaving the fishbowl as is and formally renaming it.”
The renaming proposal, per Cusimano, has not yet been approved.
The suggested name, per one draft, was the release room.
“We’re workshopping it,” Cusimano said.
At press time, the fishbowl was, per the office booking system, currently occupied. The booking was labeled quick sync. The occupant, per direct observation through the glass wall, was standing motionless in the center of the room, looking at his phone. He had been in the room for approximately six minutes.
He was, per witnesses, looking a lot more relaxed than he had six minutes earlier.
He would, per the booking, be out in three.