Cubicle 2 Represent

Greetings from my new cube, ingeniously christened "Cubicle 2," a gargantuan alcove in our brand new Museum and Visitor's Center. Here I sit at my computer with little to do - seeing as my office phone doesn't work and my inbox isn't exactly blowing up. Even better, few people are paying me any mind, seeing as most of them are running around in the manner of the proverbial decapitated chicken.

I'm using approximately three feet of my desk space at the moment, leaving at least 9 linear feet of desk space (at the least the desk is 18 inches deep as well) open. I'm positively swimming in a three sided desk. You could say that it's desk in stereo. My god, even the opening to my cube is over 5 feet wide. I seriously think you could park a VW Beetle in this space and still have room for my chair and my portly posterior. Better yet, I'd like to try. If I fully extend my right arm, it falls about a foot short of my phone, while if I turn around in my chair and extend my arms in front of me, they fall 2 feet short of the other side of the desk. I literally have to tool around in my wheeled chair to reach my full desk potential. I could have my desktop, a laptop, a printer, a perpetual motion machine and a toaster on this desk and very likely still have room for a flea circus and my prodigious flintlock gun collection.

I gotta be honest with you (and either way it's no skin off my back) but this building seems to be more trouble than it's worth. The phones and printers aren't working, the walls are getting scuffed (and then freaked out over), and hell, at this point we're not even supposed to put anything on the walls until it's "approved." It's that great irony of nice things: people get them and then are terrified to use them for fear that they'll lose their luster. Paralysis. The storage space is roughly half of what we need while doors we need to lock from a certain side preternaturally do so from the opposite one. Either we have a cold-blooded housekeeper or of an evening the thermostats will automatically rise to above 80 degrees F. The bathroom is graced with overly enthusiastic automatically flushing toilets - if you count an average 3 unprompted flushes per visit as any indication.

Adding to the fun, arm-chair quarterbacks are crawling out of the woodwork. The higher ups in the building across the street are telling us that we can't put plants on the window sills or leave our blinds fully open "because people can see in". God forbid our office appear "lived in." Other administrators think we need to make some fancy posters to put on our old office door to inform people we're no longer there. Even others think we should create a wicker man and burn a few criminals alive (yeah, that one's not true.) Meanwhile, while I sit here cozily in Chateau D'Cubicle 2, my colleagues register new complaints by the minute... In fact, my favorite is that last week, to commemorate our new space, it was suggested that we go out to lunch as an office today. Just recently some of my younger colleagues have discovered that the office is not, in fact, buying their lunch. To hear them wail you'd have thought they'd been stabbed.

No doubt these are merely just rough points that will be ironed out. There were bound to be problems with a new building and we jumped in with both feet. For reasons I've yet to ascertain we moved into this building in March, even though May would have been a far more logical time to do so. First off, we'd be less busy - our already stressed director, who not only takes too much on her plate but is also experiencing withdrawal from leaving an office that she's worked in for more than half her life, will likely see her head explode before the week is done. Everyone is stressed because this is something different, and perhaps even more so that this space is not "perfect." What's more, the building isn't technically "finished." The museum part of the "museum and visitor's center" can be more aptly described as a concrete floor. But hey, it's got lots of windows.

The positive is that this is a nice space for visitors to see when they first see campus. In addition, there's a part of me that likes being separated from the rest of the administration politic. At some point, when both my camera and my body are here at the same time, I'll take some pictures at put them up.