Made the move this week from the grand office into the tiny cubical. Seems I’m situated along a major thruway, and my boss's boss travels by at least ten times a day. He has taken an unnerving interest in me and thus removed my heretofore magic cloak of invisibility* (he noticed I missed one of his meetings; I thought with twenty or so other people I would go unmissed since I blend in pretty well with middle-aged white men). So now not only do I have to go to the lame quarterly meetings but have the high visibility of being situated on the work equivalent of Interstate-75.
And, it turned out my co-worker’s brag of bringing in truck-loads of cardboard this week was greatly exaggerated.
“We’ll make a shanty-town!” he’d exclaimed, promising to construct moat-like eight-foot cardboard cube walls and doors after showing me cubedoor.com.
I felt a bit of irrational exuberance at the thought of testing the limits of our corporation’s patience with cubical modifications. It appealed to my inner Democrat. Ideally I could see if he got away with it before beginning my own construction.
But the next day he came in with two scraggely bits of cardboard. I hadn’t even noticed – he had to point it out - that he’d narrowed the eight-foot expanse of his “vulnerability” by six inches of cardboard. I’d never seen so much promised and so little delivered since Notre Dame hired Charlie Weiss.
“You want this?” he said, holding out barely enough cardboard to cover a decent-sized book. I declined.
The biggest plus to the whole move is they put a small refrigerator in an empty cube about ten feet from me. I can use it to store extra lunches and bring them home for dinner. My wife is always very pleased when I bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan, er, microwave.
I sent my boss my lamentation (as seen on this blog!) about the loss of office space and he complimented my writing and said that I have talent and asked if I tried to pursue it as a career. I told him the average writer makes $4,000 a year and that I haven’t been able to write a novel that is any good.(Except for those two minor issues I’m good to go!) It’s the first time I felt comfortable enough to share my writing with my boss, but then he confessed that he’s writing his autobiography. He's finished four chapters on his childhood (“not too much happened”) and plans to finish it in retirement. Comedians lament, “everybody’s a comedian!”; you could say the same of writers.
* - my motto is “Keep a low profile initially, then lower it.”
UPDATE: Seems I must've properly shamed by cube mate, for he brought in a bunch of cardboard and festooned it as a sheave around his cube. It didn't last long; it was up all of thirty minutes before our boss told him to take it down. But 'tis better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all. (Image for this post found here; all rights preserved in mason jars.)
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