The author in her native environment
I pretty much feel that cubes are a slap in the face of your employees. Ha ha, in order to have a roof over your head, ironically, we can slave-drive you in a box without a roof over your head.. You know the expression of a hundred monkeys typing away on a hundred typewriters...that's how I feel each day sitting in a cube.
Disclaimer: I love my job, I'm grateful I have a job, blah blah. This isn't job-centric. This is WORK-centric. No matter who my employer is, I still feel this way. /job security blurb.
I guess it could be worse. I briefly worked for a consulting company and was on location at Nortel...now as fantastic as Nortel was to work (every non-payday Friday was "TGIF" where they brought in ice cream, food, drinks....every Friday was fantastic!), they put their consultants in one of those "open concept" type of things. I guess it's good for productivity...you can't exactly surf the web easily...but that also meant if the jackass next to you was talking with another dude aobut something on his screen, you might as well have been involved in the conversation. Heck, we used to talk so much that it got to the point that we were notorious chatters...call me crazy, but if you put say a group of people at a wedding at the same dinner table...even without initially knowing each other....in the end, they WILL end up talking. You want to get people to shut up and work? Help them not SEE each other.
So yeah, it could be worse.
And I've only ever shared a cube once, which worked out well because it was with someone with just as little job ethics as I had (name withheld to protect the innocent...the STARR witness....)...
But in the end, unless you've got a DOOR...cubes just effing suck. The same job where I had to share a cube, the managers didn't even get offices...but ohhhh, to show seniority...they got little sliding doors. WTF. Who actually thinks "well the peons get cubes...the managers will get cubes and plexiglass doors...yes that'll show them who's got rank"....
I used to want to hang a shower curtain as a door....
Lemme tell you about HALF cube walls. First off, you can't hang JACK on the walls...everything gets knocked over because it's all at desk-level. And people ALWAYS hang over the side of the walls to chat, which not only makes things fall even more, but also makes it hard to get anything done. Don't get me wrong, i LOVE chatting with people, and I'm just as guilty...i'm blaming the cube walls, not the people. Heck, you can't even have a decent shelving system with half cube walls because the shelf ends up just sitting on your desk.
I pretty much think that the idiots who decide cube strategies all have OFFICES and know nothing about how people in cubes work.
You know who knows cube life? The guy who invented monitor mirrors. THAT DUDE deserves a nobel prize.
Another critical factor in the cubicle's rapid ascent was Uncle Sam. During the 1960s, to stimulate business spending, the Treasury created new rules for depreciating assets. The changes specified clearer ranges for depreciation and established a shorter life for furniture and equipment, vs. longer ranges assigned to buildings or leasehold improvements. (Today companies can depreciate office furniture in seven years, whereas permanent structures--that is, offices with walls--are assigned a 39.5-year rate.)
The upshot: A company could recover its costs quicker if it purchased cubes. When clients told Herman Miller of that unexpected benefit, it became a new selling point for the Action Office. After only two years on the market, sales soared. Competitors took notice.
I think my ASS is depreciating at a rate of 7 years. I should be able to write that off on my taxes too wtf.
1 comment:
I went from having the half-walled cubicle to having next to know wall where all that separated me from my team lead was 8 inches cubicle wall. The rest was open concept, I had one wall where I could hang network diagrams and other cubicle wall swag. Mornings were always interesting because she's not a morning person and I like to keep to myself in the morning, (more for my safety) so she'd start in on me and I'd be all snarky back. Not good in the long run. Then the Director of our LOB thought it would be a good idea to move me to another project which was down one floor. I didn't like it at first because I thought it was some conspiracy but I ended up scoring a window seat, (Prime real estate in the cubicle land); I went from 8 inch walls to half walls, (a definite improvement); and a shelf. Windows are great makeshift whiteboards. :)
I wouldn't complain too much Sabina, you've got an Aeron chair, I swear people drool over mine at work. And I've had a few friends try and talk me out of my Aeron chair in my home office.
I've got a 21" monitor that I share between both my work laptops and I get asked every week where I scammed it from. I'm like the kid on the street that's got all the cubicle cool toys. lol :)
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