Office Hours twelve block-built workers getting through a day at the office
A block-built office floor seen from one corner, where twelve workers type, take calls, queue for coffee and chat at the water cooler. Between the work come sofa breaks, pranks, paper-ball fights, chair races, meetings and now and then a party with cake and a conga line.
Free to install. Office Hours unlocks with Pro, $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year. Cancel anytime.
What you see on every new tab
Office Hours shows a whole office floor from above one corner, built from big textured blocks: a meeting room with a long table and a chart on the wall, the boss's office on a red rug, a kitchen with a chequered floor, a reception desk by the door and ten desks in pods in the middle. Rubber ducks turn up everywhere, on the desks, in a painting over the blue sofa and in boxes stacked by the wall. The boss, the receptionist and the mail clerk have jobs of their own, and the other nine each have habits: some are chatty, some sporty, some sleepy, two are pranksters. Each of them picks what to do next, so the day never plays out in the same order twice.
At the desks: most of the time people sit and type. A ringing phone pops up over a head and the call gets taken, the sleepy ones nod off with Zs drifting up, someone stops to think until a light bulb appears and then types faster, and now and then a crumpled sheet gets tossed onto the floor.
Errands: workers fetch coffee, make copies, send faxes, grab snacks, gaze out of the window and shoot paper balls at a little hoop, three tries at a time. The copier sometimes jams and smokes until it is kicked, and the vending machine sometimes keeps the snack until it is shaken and kicked. The receptionist waters the plants, the mail clerk pushes the mail cart round the desks, and the boss stands behind people, hands on hips, until they sweat and type faster.
Sofa breaks: every minute or so someone takes a break on the red sofa under the string lights, with a coffee, a snack, their phone, or a nap that ends with a jump and a stretch. Sometimes two or three sit down together and take turns telling stories.
Group scenes: ten to twenty-four seconds after one ends, the next begins: a joke told in a circle; a row at someone's desk that ends in a handshake, a huff or the boss stepping in; a meeting where a sleepy worker dozes off and gets hit by a paper ball; a paper-ball fight across the desks that starts with a paper plane and stops when they get caught; a dance that may get broken up; or a chair race along the aisle with a chequered flag, a 3, 2, 1, GO and the odd spin-out.
Pranks and parties: a prankster sticks a note on a colleague's back, and people giggle as the victim walks past until it is found; fills an empty desk with rubber ducks that fly up when the owner sits back down; or creeps up and shouts BOO, then gets chased round the office. Rarer still is a birthday: cake from the fridge, party hats, seven balloons, a wish, the candle blown out, confetti, dancing, then a conga line round the rug while the string lights cycle through colours.
The office itself was rendered once ahead of time and ships as flat pictures: the colours of the blocks, how far each light reaches, and how deep each pixel sits. Every frame your graphics card mixes the lights back in, so the screens, lamps, copier and string lights can each brighten or change colour. The workers and everything they carry or throw are drawn live in WebGL as small cubes that slip behind the furniture.
What it reacts to
Mouse and click: nothing. Nobody in the office notices the pointer, and clicks do nothing.
Music: nothing. This theme ignores music sync.
Clock: the clock on the back wall shows your computer's local time, its hands checked once a second. That is all the hour changes: the work, the breaks and the pranks run the same at three in the afternoon as at three in the morning.
Night: after dusk the windows fade from daylight to deep blue and the room's general light drops to under half, while the floor lamps, desk lamps, computer screens and string lights grow brighter. The theme paints its own night, so the page-wide dimming is not added on top. The workers carry on as by day.
Free or Pro?Pro
Ambient New Tab is free to install, with three free themes. Office Hours is a Pro theme. Pro is $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year, cancel anytime, and it unlocks every Pro theme, music sync, and every new theme as we release it. You can preview Office Hours full screen before you buy: open the Themes panel and rest your mouse on it. Changed your mind? 14-day refund, no questions.
Open a new tab and click the Themes pill in the bottom-right corner.
Pick Office Hours. Done.
Office Hours on a 1280×800 New Tab page.
Questions
Do the workers go home at night?
No. Apart from the wall clock, nothing in the theme checks the time or the date. After dusk the lighting changes, but all twelve keep typing, taking breaks and playing pranks through the night and at weekends.
Is Office Hours free?
It is a Pro theme. Pro is $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year. It unlocks every Pro theme, music sync, and every new theme as it is released. Cancel anytime.
Can I start the party, or make anything happen?
No. The mouse and clicks do nothing here, and every scene is picked at random by the office itself, with the party one of the rarest. Each new tab opens on an office that has already been running for half a minute to a minute and a half.
Does it work on my phone?
No. It's a desktop browser extension for Chrome and Edge on Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. If you're reading this on a phone, send yourself the link.
