Tag Archives: cube

Too loud to think…

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Tonight I have absolutely nothing to offer the internet. Off and on through the course of the day I was treated to the shrill metallic whir of a power drill disassembling and reassembling cubicles. As it turns out that sound apparently trips some long-dormant switch in my brain that renders me incapable of any kind of rational thought. Seriously. That’s just barely an exaggeration. I don’t have a clue what I worked on today, who I talked to, or even much more beyond the fact that I was there for some period of time.

The whole experience is vaguely unsettling, but maybe even more so because the renovation project we’re “just going to work through” appears to be slated to last several months. By the time it wraps up, I’ll probably count myself fortunate if my brain isn’t quite literally dripping out my ear.

And please, for the love of all things good and holy don’t get me started on the sheer jackassery of “renovating” office space that’s just barely five years old. My inner taxpayer would dearly love for someone to explain why it’s a fiducially responsible idea.

A minute to breathe…

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The hardest days aren’t necessarily the longest ones. They’re not necessarily the ones where the most important decisions are made. There not even the one where there is a crisis around every turn.

The days that cause me the most trouble are the ones where you never manage to come up for air. Nothing I’m doing is especially hard – I’m not unlocking the secrets of the atom. Nothing I touch on a daily basis could even remotely be considered a matter of life or death. Even so, that doesn’t mean that it’s not without its pitfalls.

The pitfall today was a simple matter of volume – of too many people wanting too much information compounded by the fact that it’s utterly impossible to really concentrate while sitting in a cube farm. The layout simply isn’t designed for that. In fact, they’re designed precisely to encourage “collaboration” (read, idle chatter). As wonderful as a team may be, there’s no greater killer of focused concentration, in my considered opinion, than cramming as many people as possible into a given area and telling them then to go forth and do great work.

Today was mentally exhausting even though I have precious little to show for it. Tomorrow will be mentally exhausting too. So will the day after that. It’s possible that every time you see me my brain is just a little more exhausted than it was the day before.

Even on the mundane days, I think all I need is a couple of minutes to breathe between the endless rounds of pointless questions and unstoppable conversation. It’s the kind of wish only a fairy godmother could grant, because there isn’t a chance of it happening in the real world.

Gratification…

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I know my sense of how the universe works is probably a little off by “normal” standards, but I find something deeply gratifying about telling Outlook to turn on my out-of-office message. It’s one of those rare bits of the day that feel like I really got something accomplished, namely that I’ve officially told anyone trying to track me down that I won’t be checking voice messages or email for the next seven days.

That’s not strictly true, of course. I’ll still be tethered as tightly as ever to my own electronics, but for these next few days anyone looking for me at my desk or eagerly awaiting a response is going to have to cool their jets while I go do other, more interesting things.

Because there are no free lunches in this life, I know all this means is the pile of things on my desk, jammed into my inbox, and waiting on me to “push three to hear your messages now” will be immense by the time I get back next week. That’s just going to have to be next week’s problem. I’ve only got the RAM onboard to be concerned with so many things at one time and frankly none of the issues on or around my 50 square feet of cubicle are even close to making the cut.

Three tips for workplace survival…

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I make a concerted effort to steer this blog away from specific issues at my own office and more towards a general discussion of work in general and the foibles of the workplace writ large. However, like the modern cop dramas that everyone seems to love these days, the following issues are ripped from the headlines of real life experience while working in an office somewhere in Maryland. No bureaucrats were physically harmed in the writing of this post, but their souls might just be a little more crushed for the experience.

1. Don’t send an email and then immediately walk over to the recipient’s desk to tell them you sent an email. Thanks to the little glowing screen on their desk, they probably know this already. Plus, there’s a good chance they’re working on something and will get to whatever issue you’re having in its order of importance to them, not based on the number of times you ask for it. In fact, multiple requests for the same information will result in all of your messages being shifted to the bottom of the pile.

2. If you’re working in an office far removed from lunch options, there’s a safe bet that you’ll do at least a little eating at your desk. While it’s sad and depressing in its own right, the thing people need to remember is that the lunch break is sacrosanct. It should be inviolable, except under the most extreme of circumstances. If you approach someone’s desk and they’re stuffing half a sandwich into their face, that shouldn’t be considered an open invitation for a long winded discussion about anything. That’s especially true if the victim of your verbal deluge is trying to read a few pages of a book or magazine while jamming his face full of food – pretty much the universal sign that they’re on break and not working at the moment. If you’re one to be stuck eating at your desk on the regular, picking up a Do Not Disturb or Out to Lunch sign to hang on your cube at appropriate times might not be a bad investment.

3. If you think you’re having a discrete personal conversation on the phone in your cubicle, think again. Everyone within earshot knows if you’re blowing up at your wife, behind on your mortgage, or recently contracted the herp. Yes, we all know having those conversations from the comfort of your office chair is convenient, but sometimes everyone would be better served if you wandered off somewhere and had that discussion on your cell phone. When you’re forced by your profession to sit shoulder to shoulder with them for eight hours a day, you can at least do them all the favor of not discussing your most recent bout of hemorrhoids?

If you found these tips useful, remember there are plenty more hints and tricks handily outlined in Nobody Told Me: The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees.

Deception…

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In the universe of the bureaucratic underling, few things are more highly sought after than a cubicle next to a window. Generally assigned based on seniority in rank or time in service, it’s one of the small things that can make a cube feel less like a 5×8 coffin and more like an actual productive work area.

Sometimes, of course, appearances are deceiving. When you show up in a new office and there’s a prime window seat with your name on it, tread carefully. In any normal office, this seat would have been fought over and allocated long before you showed up. If it’s sitting empty, consider it a warning sign… Like the beautiful house on the tree lined street never quite seems to stay sold, there’s a fair chance this cube has problems. Someone might have died there in harness and it’s haunted or at a minimum it’s cursed by one or more of the myriad problems that tend plague a cubicle and all those who dwell in them.

If there’s any good news to be had it’s that not much in life is permanent. You’ll probably get a chance to move into something more attuned to your needs (eventually). Of course you’ll be leaving behind the window, but if a career in service has taught me anything, it’s that windows are easy enough to come by, but you only get a finite amount of sanity to shepherd you through 30+ years of toil. If you ever had to pick between the window and some sanity, it’s what you’d call no contest.

For more helpful tips someone really should have mentioned before letting you go to work as an office drone, don’t forget to get your very own copy of Nobody Told Me: The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Drivers who think they can, but really can’t. Look, I like speed. I have the tickets and warnings to prove it. Generally I feel as safe with my own driving at 85 as I do at 25. Sadly, I can’t say I have the same level of confidence in everyone else on the road… especially the wannabe rice racer who cut the turn just a little to wide this morning and earned himself some first hand experience in how understeering is every bit as bad as oversteering . He should probably be allowed to get some kind of refund from his driving instructor. On the other hand, I have now personally seen the look of abject horror someone in a Honda Civic gets on their face when they find themselves unexpectedly traveling in the wrong lane with a Tundra bearing down on them. Hopefully he didn’t spend too long in the ditch, because that’s where he was headed when I rounded the next turn and rolled on with my morning commute.

2. Breaking my own rules. I think we all know that I hate speakerphones in an open-bay office setting. It really serves no purpose other than ratcheting up the noise level in a room that already has the acoustics of a train station. I was forced into a position of breaking my own rules today by participating in part of a call using a speakerphone in a “wide open” room. I was mortified, but it happened so fast that I couldn’t stop it. I have no other excuses. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

3. Too much of a bad thing. I know I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: I don’t think I’ve ever attended a meeting that I didn’t want to escape from within five minutes of it starting. Sadly, my opinion doesn’t seem to carry much weight when such decisions are made. Which is how you end up with so many meetings scheduled between now and the end of the month that the “September Meeting to Discuss Issue X” has to be moved into October. You might think that means the “October Meeting to Discuss Issue X” would get cancelled. You would be wrong, because what it really means is that we should just go ahead and have two “Meetings to Discuss Issue X” in October. So as soon as the ten pre-meeting meetings for the October “September Meeting” are finished, we get to immediately start on pre-meetings for the October “October Meeting.” Clearly common sense, logic, and reason have no place here.

The Big D…

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Attention Colleagues:

Open bay cubicles are not the appropriate venue to discuss the ongoing drama of your divorce proceedings, the backbiting antagonism of your ex-husband, or details of the child support decree that you’ve decided to fight. As interested as the person you’re talking to might find this tragic tale of woe, the other 12 people sitting in the room aren’t nearly as interested. Well, technically, I suppose they are, but mostly because it’s grist for the lunchtime gossip mill.

I wouldn’t go so far as suggest that there is a firewall between your professional and personal life, but perhaps it would be wise to install some kind of filter on what you decide the entire office needs to know. Really, it’s as much for your own good as it is for ours.
Thanks for your kind attention in this matter.

Very respectfully yours,

Jeff

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date

Cubicle stalker…

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I came back from lunch to find one of the more emotionally needy members of the team standing in my cube. You know the ones; they need special reassurance that they’re doing the things right… every time they do anything… regardless of how basic the task. Yeah. That guy. I’m sure you’ve met him.

According to sources in a position to know, he had been standing there for 15 minutes. Standing in my cube, while I was at lunch, for at least 15 minutes. Just standing there. And waiting. Standing there waiting to tell me that he had uploaded some documents to our network drive.

In the future, it would be completely appropriate under these circumstances to send me an email. Leave me a note. A voicemail I’ll even get eventually. Though really, you can feel free to upload files to the network to your heart’s content without my direct supervision. That’s probably another issue altogether, really.

I can’t fathom why, in the name of all things good and holy, it might have seemed like a good idea to spend 15 minutes standing in my cube waiting for me to come back from lunch. Were you expecting a treat of some sort? Up until today, that was the only 55 square feet of real estate in the entire building where I feel even a modicum of sanity. You’ve taken that from me now. The sanctity of my cube has been violated.

I can’t tell you how much I don’t need a cubicle stalker in my life.

Editorial Note: This is part of a continuing series of previously unattributed posts appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Brave new world…

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In countless briefings, charts, and memos, my agency uses the standard “traffic light” metric to express whether a particular project was operating within tolerance. Green was good to go. Amber signals that there is a problem. Red, the most dreaded status, indicates that the project has come off the rails. The phrase “apathy is green” began as an offhand remark to a colleague that my level of disinterest had maxed out for the day. As my career progressed, that simple phrase came to identify more and more closely with how I feel every day pulling into the parking lot in the dark hours of the morning. My level apathy is most assuredly green – top of the scale. My cup-o-apathy runneth over, as it were.

I’ve been blogging for a long time now and I noticed that over time the posts came back to the issues I was dealing with at the office. I’d write out a diatribe only to realize that while posting it would be cathartic, I wasn’t quite willing to commit career suicide to get things off my chest. Many of those old posts got deleted before I ever finished writing them, a few of them got saved, and the ones that did get published were so cut down and vague that they bore little resemblance to the facts of the matter. Launching this new blog, removed from personal connections, gives me a fresh opportunity to approach these topics

In the tradition of Office Space and Dilbert, I intend to use this space as a forum to tell tales from the workplace. For those, like me, who dwell day to day in a cubicle, I can only assume that many of the people and situations I intend to describe will sound familiar to you. For the happy few who live beyond the cube farm, perhaps all I can offer is an insight into life as a cog in the great bureaucracy. Like any writer, I welcome your feedback, your criticism, and your participation.

I am a bureaucrat. These are my experiences. Thanks for reading along.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.