I know, I know, you really want a promotion. We all do, but according to the recent annual review (yours and mine alike) we're just not the right material to move up to management, no matter how warm we've kept our desks during the intervening years. That's okay, though, even though it isn't. You can kid yourself all you like, but at the end of the day, the day still ends, and you can't do anything about it.You're a good, smart, indispensable and loyal employee, and you know it, so be bitter all you like (I recommend a just-short-of-postal degree of bitterness,) but you can't do anything about it, so take what you can, how you can, and let's make this business work already.
Let's say you've got a cubicle, which is statistically just about certain. The first time I had a cube I had replaced two guys that made more than me (each), and a cube smaller than either of them. That was a miserable deal, but what killed me was that there were five of us in the room, and the two guys who got the window were "outside" sales guys. They were almost never in the office, but were the only ones within 12-feet of the outside world. We didn't have a view of anything, but come on, can't I look outside whilst perpetually on hold too?
Answer is decidedly "no", but isn't there something I can do about it?
When I came up for my review, I didn't even get a raise enough to catch me up to either of the two people whose jobs I'd taken over, but worse, I still didn't get the darn window, which is double-sad at least. Not content to take "no" for an answer, I took my own advantage instead… I made my cubicle bigger.
I looked at the wall configuration, and seeing that nobody but me was ever there early, late or over lunch breaks, I figured it was my duty to adjust those silly cube walls as needed to make the best use of the space available.
I took long walls and changed them out with short walls. I took short walls and replaced them with half walls. I also took bare walls and replaced them with promotional posters, as if to make the space seem so conspicuously ugly that my coworkers couldn't even notice that they're cubes had magically diminished.
I increased my cubicle from 80-square-feet to 108-square-feet, and none of my obviously absent, adjacent cube-mates even noticed it had happened.
If you can't get the raise or respect you deserve, you should at least consider making yours a cubicle worthy of praise, if not at least office-wide curiosity and suspicion. I did it, and though I quickly left after I was rejected yet again for a raise, I felt really, really good about it.
On an unsurprising side-note, the company went through three-rounds of buyout, down-sizing and bankruptcy over fewer than four years. Maybe consider that, if your cubicle is thusly, artificially confined, your company might likewise be gone before you know it.
All UPSable
