To date I have spent 17 1/2 of the past 19 work years sitting in cubicles, the exception to this being the 18 months I worked in Spokane, Washington. The very nice people there in Spokane gave me my own office, complete with a door and a name plate and everything. I was 23 years old at the time and I assumed they had given me an an office because I was so important. In retrospect I realize it was more like Goonies, in which the Fratellis kept Sloth chained up in the basement out of the eye of the general public. Either way, I greatly enjoyed having a private area. I enjoyed the privacy and the ability to listen to music and not annoy the people around me. (My taste in music annoys everyone around me.) I also enjoyed the ability to sit in a little room and fart all day long.
Man I miss farting in that little room.
Aside from those 18 months, the other 17 1/2 years have been spent in spots like this:
That picture is from 2002. I have pictures of most of the cubes I have sat in dating back to 1995. While the technology between the pictures changes (monitors and laptops got thinner and desktop PCs eventually disappeared), not much else changed. Since 1995, excluding Spokane, I have sat in at least 8 different rooms in probably two dozen different spots, and if I posted pictures of all of them you would be hard pressed to tell any of them apart. The government is not known for their wild design ideas. Some of the cubicles have been off-white, some have been grey, and some have been light blue, but all of them have pretty much looked the same.
Oh, I almost forgot, with one difference: when I first started our cubicles were 8 foot by 6 foot. Today, they’re 6 by 6.
When you live in cube world, occasionally you move cubes. When I started out on the help desk upstairs we moved cubes a lot and thus we traveled lightly. The more crap you hoarded meant the more stuff you would have to eventually move. A few years later I moved down to the basement and made the mistake of decorating my cube with all sorts of toys and knick-knacks. It’s can be fun to look at that stuff throughout the day but when you move it’s a pain to box it all up and haul it to your next location.
A couple of weeks ago a new cube became available and I decided to go ahead and move again. This new cube is two cubes away from where I currently sit. To explain why I decided to move I drew up a stupid diagram.
In this small room there are only five cubes. I currently sit in the front cube (“1”), closest to the front door. Cube “2”, the furthest from the door, is the one that became available and the one that I chose to move to. The front door (“3”) is the only way in or out of the room. The door to the right (“4”) leads to an empty room, but if they decide to move a bunch of people in there, a steady stream of traffic could develop between doors “3” and “4”. If that were to happen and I was still sitting in “1” (where I currently sit) that would push my ADD brain over the edge. Plus that sounds annoying and I am a pretty easily annoyed. So, this new spot is a little bit closer to my friends, and looks to be pretty quiet.
So, about moving cubes — we can’t just “move” cubes because we cannot move our own phones. Instead, after a manager approves your request to move, a work order has to be placed for moving your telephone and within a couple of weeks someone will show up to your cubicle unannounced and say “Hello, I’m moving your phone,” and then they disconnect your phone and take it and move it to the new location. This is all kind of done in secrecy. Prior to the move you’ll receive notification like “Your phone will be moved sometime next week,” so it’s always awkward and difficult to plan for especially for Type A personalities such as myself and the timing is never good.
Speaking of timing, my phone was moved while I was out on Christmas vacation, which meant if I wanted my stuff in the same place my phone was on Monday morning I had to go in during my vacation and move my stuff. That is what I did on Saturday.
“Old Cube” is where I currently sit. If you remember from the previous diagram, that was location “1”. “New Cube” is location “2”. As you can see, other than physical location within the room, they are almost identical.
I have a fairly consistent ritual when it comes to moving cubes that involves scrubbing the new cube down from top to bottom before moving into it. Several years ago I bought a pile of cleaning supplies from Dollar General, which is where all the sponges and soap in this picture came from. I spent at least 30 minutes scrubbing the cube from top to bottom, starting with the cabinets and then the countertop. I was going to sweep underneath the cube but we don’t have a broom. I will put that on my list the next time I go to Dollar General. After everything is clean I move my stuff to the new cube and, when done, clean my old cube for the next person.
After a couple of hours of scrubbing and wiring things, here’s everything set up in my new cube. Don’t let those blinds fool you — they’re blocking the view to a break area, not the outside. That vacant shelf will eventually hold whatever toys and knick-knacks I find over the next year; whenever it gets full I box it up, take them all home, and start over again.
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.
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…
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.
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.