The Cube Life

The feigned privacy of a cubicle is like your intrusive and slightly creepy friend that peeks at you through computer screen reflections (or any reflection for that matter - my least and most favorite being the unsuspecting iPhone, tilted at just the right angle so that you are able to make eerie eye contact with another) and/or takes pictures of your feet while you are in the bathroom stall (Trisha, if you still have that photo of my feet from the 9th grade, please do send over).

Thank you, Trisha.

Your cubicle is your personal space to decorate and personalize as you please - it becomes your cozy me-space. Some put up pictures of their family, really bad artwork their children made for them (why would you ever do that, I would never do that it looks so bad), some line their shelves with mugs and stuffed animals, books they'll never read - all in a desperate attempt to make the desolate gray feel a little less exposed and a little more like home.

Sometimes, just sometimes, when I am alone in my cubicle, which I conveniently share with my manager, I feel unexposed, clothed, private and intimate. So I open a new tab on my laptop like its a gift I shouldn't be opening on Christmas Eve but just wanna sneak a peek to see if it's an Easy Bake Oven (12 Christmases and still no pink and purple oven) and in my new tab, I type: what are the differences between an English bulldog and a French bulldog? or why do the two sportscasters for the American Olympic swimming time trials sit so close to each other so that their noses almost touch? or I simply browse images of funny exercise machines - all these little things that lift and tickle my soul. But then, I feel a light breeze behind me or hear the footsteps of The Man and all of a sudden I am exposed again and I snap back to reality. MUST ANALYZE THREE-HUNDRED VIDEOS. COMPLETE SPREADSHEET TABLES. SEND EMAIL TO PERSON IN INDIA. CHUG WATER. PHOTOSHOP CEO'S FACE. And just like that, my eyes become swirly again and my cubicle staycation is over.

The other day my manager was chatting with a co-worker who upon exiting, accidentally knocked off a coat hanger that hangs in our cubicle and my manager faked a melodramatic, "You're messing up my cube! This is our HOME!" And the three of us collectively shared an office-laugh, y'know like a golf clap - polite and contained but really inside it's like just waiting to explode from all the suppression. All of us that harvest in a cube farm develop a similar humor that is rooted in our bitter search for personal space and identity in the gray and angular. We share the pain, but more importantly we share the laughs, and of course we all have our own distinct ways to cope, our own means of finding the little delights in every work day, in every exposed corner and uniform space of the corporate farm. Welcome to the cube life.