We can all agree: Open plan offices are the scourge of 21st-century office life. As anyone who’s worked in one knows, open plans are noisy and distracting as hell, and recent studies have even proven that they decrease personal interactions (and increase emails), sap productivity levels, and even promote sexism in subtle, overlooked ways. Yet, unsurprisingly, the open plan is an undeniably cost and space-efficient way for companies to cram more desks and workers into limited spaces and meet the bottom line–which means they’re not likely to go away anytime soon.

Absence, as they say, makes the heart grow fonder. So while you dream about returning to the cubicle you once scorned, the internet has delivered some hilarious, questionably effective DIY hacks to surviving an open plan office in the meantime. The open plan office isn’t an overblown hot topic in the media, it’s something that thousands of real people endure on the regular, across industries.

Case in point: A Redditor recently asked the online community for suggestions on how to endure their open plan office. On the fire thread that resulted, Redditors amassed hundreds of suggestions for surviving another day in the bullpen. It’s a telling glimpse at how real people are reckoning with this flawed design paradigm–ranging from simple hacks to jokey behavior we wouldn’t necessarily condone.

BUY A “BUSY LIGHT” OR REARVIEW MIRROR

Many commenters endorsed using a variant of a color-coded “busy light” to indicate when you’re head down, focused on a task, or in a meeting.