You know you’re in an open-plan office when you click on an article that will allow you to hate-read about open offices, then kind of hide your computer screen with the top half of your torso so that your colleagues don’t realize just how much you’re not a team player.

You know you’re in an open office because you’re trying to write a sensitive email while wedged between one coworker making a gynecologist appointment and another picking tuna-fish salad out of his Invisalign.

The office’s openness is never more real to you than when you try to have a private conversation with the intern about the office dress code, only to further expose the entire office—to a lesson in micro-generational social norms and the definition of a “cold-shoulder top.”

Around 70 percent of offices in the United States are open-concept, according to the BBC, even though these paper-pushing panopticons make us more likely to get sick, and make us less likely to be ... uh, what was I saying ... productive. Because of all the distractions.

But now, science might have an answer, sort of, in the form of chairs shaped like eggs and ceilings that bounce your own squawks back at you, forcing you to quiet down through a trick of acoustic psychology.

Manuj Yadav / University of Sydney

This comes to us from, as the press release notes, “researchers in Australia, who’ve discovered that open-plan spaces could benefit from additional specialized and local acoustic treatments.”