Not long ago a friend told me how she had come to end her relationship with WeWork, the entrepreneurial-class fun house that at recent count had been rolled out in 59 cities around the world. A playwright and producer, she had been renting office space at a WeWork location in Brooklyn when one night a little over a year ago, she showed up after a rehearsal to get some rewriting done and found a party in progress.

As she settled down at her desk, she could see that across the hall a couple was getting down to business of the kind that did not involve calculating price-earnings ratios. Things were loud and many people around her, none of whom she knew, were drunk, but she was determined to spend the next hour or so accomplishing something despite the ambient hedonism.

That effort was thwarted when two men who comfortably fit the stereotype of young hustlers on Planet Start-Up approached her desk, sat on it and began a vaguely menacing flirtation — poking at her computer, reading what was on the screen, poking at her. The next day she decided to render a complaint about the bacchanal she had encountered — if that were what she wanted, she could save $1,000 a month and set up a laptop on a curb in the meatpacking district on a Friday at midnight.

But where or to whom would one deliver a grievance? WeWork makes it easier to speak with a human being than other innovators born of the Silicon Valley ethos that talking on the phone is as crude an anachronism as cleaning your girdle with a washboard, but it is still not a simple matter. When my friend finally reached someone at the company, she was greeted solicitously and told she could have a desk on another part of the floor away from the offending fraternity. But moving a woman around to accommodate male misbehavior felt like a solution Roger Sterling would have come up with during the second season of “Mad Men.” Disillusioned, she left and sought another arrangement.