I am sitting in a building built to the highest standards about four years ago, from the ground up, at great expense. Only the most crucial people get a cubicle in this building, much less an office.
Yet the meeting room I'm spending the day in has no outlets in the walls for the 20 people sitting around the walls in the room. The 12 people sitting at the table get powered, but everyone else – no electrons for you.
On the one hand, laptops are better than they used to be. Mine will almost make it a day. Unless I want to do, you know, actual work. Matlab. So I guess it enforces paying attention. But everyone here has their laptop open. So really it's just bad design.
It's also well known that this state-of-the-art building has some of the crappiest projectors on campus. Some in fact are not even HD, but SD with only component inputs. In other words, useless. Worse than useless, cause we have spent hours trying to get them to work before we all huddled like cavemen around the dying embers of a laptop screen…