As I begin a new chapter of my life — as a cube dweller in Silicon Valley — I look back wistfully at the last three years… which, frankly, I feel like I wasted now. Oh, yes, I bummed around and sat in the sun and planted flowers and just generally enjoyed my sabbatical; but with years of cubicle occupation staring me in the face, I kind of wish I’d done something more memorable than just uprooting my life, moving 3,000 miles away, and buying a half-million-dollar teeny tiny bungalow.
Some people are never happy, you know?
My new cubicle, which is approximately the size of a chicken coop, has one bizarre and demented feature that I just can’t figure out. The cube is something like 4 feet by 6 feet, I think, and the side and front walls are about 4 feet high. I can easily look right over them when sitting in my chair. Yet, the front wall segment right beside the “door” has a glass window in it. About 3 feet off the floor, a little 1-foot-high window that seems to serve no purpose whatsoever. Is it to admit light? Allow me to see out?
What’s really demented is that it is dual pane glass. I suppose this is helpful for climate control or something. Don’t want to lose all that heat in my cube.
Sort of reminds me of the cubes in my former office building; the wall between each cube had a panel of frosted, textured glass (or it was probably plastic, now that I think about it) along the top, supposedly to let light filter through. (Though you can also use it to quickly see if your cube neighbor was in.)
Yikes, dual pane glass is a bit much though.
Doggie door.
Oh Gene, welcome to my world.
OK, at the moment I have an office, but when I worked at UW I had a cubicle that had a window into my boss’ office and a window into the VP’s office. It was the strangest set up ever.
Cube-newbie! The glass is your own miniature white-board.
And it’s dual-pane so that the clawing from your cube neighbor won’t be as loud.
But look on the bright side, you now have more than a decade’s worth of Dilbert to go read and appreciate anew!