The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy has this to say about open office building windows:
The Great Ventilation and Telephone Riots of SrDt 3454 had started off
as just a lot of hot air. Hot air was, of course, the problem that
ventilation was supposed to solve and generally it had solved the
problem reasonably well up to the point when someone invented
air-conditioning, which solved the problem far more throbbingly.
And that was all well and good provided you could stand the noise and
the dribbling until someone else came up with something even sexier
and smarter than air-conditioning which was called in-building climate
control.
Now this was quite something.
The major differences from just ordinary air-conditioning were that it
was thrillingly more expensive, involved a huge amount of
sophisticated measuring and regulating equipment which was far better
at knowing, moment by moment, what kind of air people wanted to
breathe than mere people did.
It also meant that, to be sure that mere people didn't muck up the
sophisticated calculations which the system was making on their
behalf, all the windows in the buildings were built sealed shut. This
is true.
While the systems were being installed, a number of people who were
going to work in the buildings found themselves having conversations
with Breathe-o-Smart systems fitters which went something like this:
`But what if we want to have the windows open?'
`You won't want to have the windows open with new Breathe-o-Smart.'
`Yes but supposing we just wanted to have them open for a little bit?'
`You won't want to have them open even for a little bit. The new
Breathe-o-Smart system will see to that.'
`Hmmm.'
`Enjoy Breathe-o-Smart!'
`OK, so what if the Breathe-o-Smart breaks down or goes wrong or
something?'
`Ah! One of the smartest features of the Breathe-o-Smart is that it
cannot possibly go wrong. So. No worries on that score. Enjoy your
breathing now, and have a nice day.'
(It was, of course, as a result of the Great Ventilation and Telephone
Riots of SrDt 3454, that all mechanical or electrical or
quantum-mechanical or hydraulic or even wind, steam or piston-driven
devices, are now requited to have a certain legend emblazoned on them
somewhere. It doesn't matter how small the object is, the designers of
the object have got to find a way of squeezing the legend in
somewhere, because it is their attention which is being drawn to it
rather than necessarily that of the user's.
The legend is this:
`The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing
that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot
possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to
get at or repair.')
Major heat waves started to coincide, with almost magical precision,
with major failures of the Breathe-o-Smart systems. To begin with
this merely caused simmering resentment and only a few deaths from
asphyxiation.
The real horror erupted on the day that three events happened
simultaneously. The first event was that Breathe-o-Smart Inc. issued
a statement to the effect that best results were achieved by using
their systems in temperate climates.
The second event was the breakdown of a Breathe-o-Smart system on a
particularly hot and humid day with the resulting evacuation of many
hundreds of office staff into the street where they met the third
event, which was a rampaging mob of long distance telephone operators
who had got so twisted with having to say, all day and every day,
`Thank you for using BS&S' to every single idiot who picked up a
phone that they had finally taken to the streets with trash cans,
megaphones and rifles.
In the ensuing days of carnage every single window in the city,
rocket-proof or not, was smashed, usually to accompanying cries of
`Get off the line, asshole! I don't care what number you want, what
extension you're calling from. Go and stick a firework up your bottom!
Yeeehaah! Hoo Hoo Hoo! Velooooom! Squawk!' and a variety of other
animal noises that they didn't get a chance to practice in the normal
line of their work.
As a result of this, all telephone operators were granted a
constitutional right to say `Use BS&S and die!' at least once an hour
when answering the phone and all office buildings were required to
have windows that opened, even if only a little bit.