Office1000 Blog July Archive

The Top Eight Ways Cubicle Walls Have Saved Your Life

By Brian K White at 07/11/2007 11:53

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.

Top List of Things to Hide in Your Executive Desk

Since your latest promotion hasn't afforded you the luxury of a window with a view looking out at your very own parking lot and the building across the lot from your own, you should have at least negotiated for a new executive desk, whether brand spanking new or handed down otherwise.

For the sake of argument, we'll assume you've got the executive desk, and it's a good thing because it affords all the much more opportunity to hide all sorts of things inside of it. If you're not sure what benefits I mean, you need only read the following list of clever, dare I say "brilliant" suggestions.

• Start by stealing all the staples from the supply cabinet. Doesn't matter if there's a dozen boxes or a thousand, they stack neatly and you should be able to horde enough to keep the office manager in confusion for months on end. As long as you don't take them out of your desk, it isn't stealing, it's appropriating.

• If your lunch is of sufficiently "dry goods" fashion, you can keep your lunch in it, where better to keep it than your own desk, You can file it under "L" for lunch, "D" for desk lunch, "N" for noon, "S" for safekeeping or any other place, or letter as it makes sense to you. Think about it, it's your desk, after all.

• When searching online for dozens, nay, hundreds of "free ebooks", you can always print them out to the exorbitant cost of your boss and file them in your desk by whatever means you wish to keep them safe, secure, and by no means ever "read".

• Buy the ad-ons for the desk, and prop up all kinds of additional things, specifically your family photos so you can remember always why you're working such a job all day (and well into the evenings) to keep it all up.

• If it's your last few days in the job, consider a zip-lock bag sealed tight with Limburgher cheese. That stuff is so nasty that even an ounce or so will, within a few days, stink up the office beyond anybody's capacity of imagination. Especially if you stick it a file-folder within a drawer, it will be easy for it to virtually ruin the office literal weeks before the problem can be fixed.

• You can use your executive desk to intimidate summer interns, falsely convincing them that you have some sort of authority around the office, though it's obviously limited to your ability to trick unpaid labor into believing that your title actually means something which it plainly does not.

Whether you're looking for a new executive desk, or just trying to find a way to make the best of the executive desk you've already earned in lieu of an actual promotion or raise, there are many ways to push up the profits and benefits, and all while earning the better of your situation all around.