View from a Cube

I have been working in corporate America since I was 13 (shhhh... don't tell anyone!) doing summer jobs as an office assistant. Eventually by my final years in college, I was a full fledged member of a team. I loved the fact that I was always in an office and that experience helped me get my foot in the door when I finished my bachelors. The only thing was that I was spoiled. I had always had an office, for a couple of summers I had an office all to myself. There is a certain power that comes to having your own office. People have to knock to enter, you can shut the door for privacy, you can decorate (more or less) in styles that you like. Then I came to the real world and for the past five years I have worked in....a cubicle.

Having never worked in one before it took some getting used to. Your back is almost always to the 'door', you have limited room and limited space for your photos and such, and you get little or no privacy. Working for the government in a cubicle environment was even more constraining. When I began my first government contracting job, I had a cubicle to myself; it was smaller than my walk-in closet at home. Still I managed to make it my own.

After a couple of months, I began to realize some of the problems associated with working in one besides the obvious. Chief among these was the phone. Egads, how could such a useful device turn into torture? One of my first cube neighbors was a guy who often took teleconferences. But he didn't have a headset or a love of keeping the phone cradled in his shoulder. Instead, this 'gentleman' would turn up the speakerphone and listen to it on mute. All the while he's busy reading the paper or surfing the web. I think the funniest incident was when he missed a question and didn't realize they were talking to him until I snapped him out of his day dream.

Another cube neighbor I had was a rather nerdy looking fellow but apparently a suave enough guy to have a girlfriend. How do I know, because he would call her every day, every hour. The one nice thing was that they took bathroom breaks where they would hang up the phone. In those six months that we were neighbors, I lived through every lovey-dovey good morning conversation, listening to details of how she was brewing a cup of coffee, deciding what to wear, listening as he described what he thought of as she brushed her teeth. I even had to endure some of their arguements. As bad as it sounds, one day when it seemed they broke up, I said a silent cheer for myself. The Simon and Garfunkle song, "The Sound of Silence" started ringing in my mind. The sad thing was that they did eventually get back together and that's when the phone began again.

Towards the tail end of my stint there, some management type folks in the government decided that it was time to get back at contractors for earning tons of money and doing their jobs in half the time so they shuffled two contractors into cubicles made for one; or four contractors in cubes made for two. We were being stuffed and the term sardine came to mind. It's funny seeing full grown adults get into arguements regarding elbow room and who is on someone else's side of the table. There were no name calling or hairpulling scenes but we got close a couple of times. Thankfully before I went nuts, I took up a new job and moved on.

I'm still in a cube but at least the environment is better. I'm closer to a window so I can see outside. Previously I was buried in a cube so deep inside the building that one morning I didn't realize we had snow on the ground until I came out to get some coffee. Since this is a company cube and not a contractor cube, my domain is relatively safe. Sure we have the occasional rubber band shooting war, but it beats coming to blows over who drank from my coffee cup.