Comments on: Life in a Cube

By: J Feinberg

J Feinberg — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 02:46:22 +0000

I’ve had the same job for 20 years, and other than the first 3 months and the last 3 months I’ve always had an office. My office for the first 6 years was the best. It was a consultants suite, filled with cubicles for four people and an enormous window over the tank farm (huge vats of chemicals – they used to do pharmaceutical manufacturing at my site). At first, I shared the office with others, but after a few months they all left when their assignments were up. I frantically started filling the office with crap and servers, and after about 2 months or so it was full of so much junk they couldn’t put anyone else in there. After a year, I pulled down most of the cubicle walls and just had an enormous office. The next office wasn’t nearly as nice – maybe 5 times smaller and a window to the hallway instead of the outdoors. They recently announced they were closing the site and laying off all the workers, and those of us that stayed on a little longer were moved to cubes for the last couple of months before they finished shutting the site down.

By: ladyjaye

ladyjaye — Mon, 06 Jan 2014 23:19:09 +0000

Aside from a 2 year period early in my career where my team’s office was actually an office with a closing door (fortunately for the earlier location of that office, which was right across a very loud printer), I’ve always worked in cubicles in my professional life (including during my 8-month internship with the Canadian government in 1998-99). At my previous workplace, we had those boring beige cubicles with some metal shelving. In my current workplace, still working in cubicles (right next to a loud printer, which means headphones are a must!), but these are much better looking with glass panels and a metal structure. Only downside: since they’re not the classic fabric-covered type, hanging anything on the walls requires magnets and suction cups. And no shelving here, but we do each have a Luxo lamp installed, which no one uses anyway.

By: Zeno

Zeno — Mon, 06 Jan 2014 18:56:57 +0000

I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy having my own office for the last four years, although the location of the office itself has been somewhat transitory. However, I also note that in the now-20 years since I started working in IT, there have only been two periods wherein I’ve had windows looking on the outside world. The first was my first professional gig in 1994 which only lasted six months. The last windowed period was only for the first few months of 2013, before I was herded off again into the fluorescent-lit recesses of the inner building, wherein I still dwell…

By: Badwolf

Badwolf — Mon, 06 Jan 2014 15:49:21 +0000

When I see cubicles, it reminds me of two things – working in advertising (back in the mid-to-late 1980’s in NYC) and the movie “Office Space.”

The funniest thing I remember was saving up the “jar of pennies.” The fellow in the next cube to me was my buddy, and we would both save jars of pennies. When the noise level in the cubicle area got unbearably low, either Eddie or I would very quietly pick up our jar of pennies and pour it into each others’ cubicles – pennies hitting that laminate desk surface have a loud and annoying sound, but we didn’t care, because we were fresh out of college and both had attitude problems; advertising was perfect for us. What made it great was that it only took 50-100 pennies to make it loud and annoying enough (Eddie mastered the “slow pour,” and often hit when I was on the phone), plus one faced the task of having to pick up all the pennies to neaten up the cube. Because of the amount of pennies, it’s not like you raked in the cash when Eddie hit me or I hit Eddie. It didn’t happen often, but it was funny when it did. It could go weeks between strikes, but then out of nowhere….

Ah, cubicles.