'The Top Eight Ways Cubicle Walls Have Saved Your Life'

The Top Eight Ways Cubicle Walls Have Saved Your Life

If you work in a cubicle farm, or "office" if you prefer, it's likely you've noticed that the myriad walls form a veritable maze devoid of any cheese reward for finding your desk at the end of it. You might not get a window, you can't see your co-workers, but those same, quasi-thatched walls may have saved your life a dozen times already and you may not even realize it.

• 1. When you're on the phone, you get an extra ounce of quiet, whether it's to hear your caller, or insure your fellow office-mates don't hear you asking your doctor for those embarrassing results from your lab test.

• 2. Thanks to cubicle walls, you now have a place to pin up thousands of Dilbert cartoons that exactly summarize precisely how miserable your sentence in the cube truly is.

• 3. Without the cubicle walls, there's no way to pop up like a gaggle of prairie dogs when something interesting happens a few cubes away.

• 4. Even if you're up against a window, which is unlikely, you now aren't tempted by the evils of actually looking out of it… no seriously, many companies, like Western Wireless in Issaquah, Washington, routinely put cubicle walls up to insure their desk-bound oarsmen don't see the outside world.

• 5. When it comes to a disgruntled coworker "going postal", you'll always have an easy place to hide, even though it's entirely possible the coworker went postal due to these very same, wonderful hiding places.

• 6. Cubicle walls stop that creepy officemate from staring at you all day. It's a pretty big benefit, at least for the 80% of us that aren't the creepy guy who gets off on leering.

• 7. When it comes time to steal more space for your own work environment, nothing says "nope, this space was always mine" quite like a cubicle wall, ideally moved about a quarter-inch per day over three-to-six months.

• 8. Just by changing the orientation of your desk, the cubicle wall can allow you to sleep for literally hours at a time, and just because your supervisor's view of you is so severely limited.