I was able to make some progress at the Council on International Educational Exchange [C.I.E.E.] in getting the people who, like me, were still in their 20's and who had attended U.S. colleges during the late 1960's and early 1970's, to realize the degree to which having to now do 9-to-5 office work in the culturally straight off-campus U.S. capitalist world of the 1970's represented both an absurdity and a deep loss in their personal freedom.
One reason I was able to make some progress was that the desks in the C.I.E.E. office were both adjacent to or facing each other and not divided up into separate, walled-off cubicles; and all the desks in the student travel department in which I worked, except for Steve's department supervisor's desk, were located within a not too large a room. So it was a lot easier to converse and flirt with my fellow office workers at C.I.E.E. than it would become later in the late 1970's and 1980's, when nearly all the Manhattan office workers were blocked off from each other and imprisoned between 9-to-5, inside the cages of a cubicle.
