When Cubelife Invades Reality
March 12th, 2006
Note: this post definitely qualifies as “Too Much Information.” But take it with a grain of salt.
I don’t have an office. In fact, no one in my company has an office – even the CEO has a cube, albeit a larger one next to the window. Our cubes are our only “private” space in the office, and some people take advantage of the carpeted walls to tack up photos, toys, posters, and all sort of knickknacks. I don’t. My walls are relatively sparse, with only work-related documents or the annual work photo staring back at me. I prefer this: after having done the whole “life is work, work is life” thing back in the dot-com days, where I spent twelve to sixteen hours a day in my office/cube, I like a clean separation between work and the rest of myself. But I do take one private, personal liberty in my cube: I fart.
Not intentionally – I don’t try to be the smelly guy in the building – but if I have to fart, I’ll let it go. We have high cube walls (the 6 footers, not the little dinky half-height cubes) and if it smells, it just drifts up to the HVAC vents. No biggie. And it’s not like it happens all the time, just every once in while. It wastes to much time to walk all the way to the bathroom just to pass gas, and even then, I’m crop-dusting all the way back to my cube.
Last Friday night I was camped out at my regular second home – er, coffee house – multiplexing between work and Japanese studying. I was VPN’d into work, running some tests, when I realized, to my horror, that I’d just let one slip. In the middle of the coffee house. I was in cube-life mentality, and somehow I brought it home with me. Luckily, it wasn’t smelly, but I had to log off and leave the coffee house immediately. Not because of the fart (hey, it happens), but because of what it indicated: my head was still at work, and I was slipping back into that nebulous grey-area where work bleeds into life and vice versa. I had to change my surroundings to help me change my head.
And that was the day farting taught me a lesson.
(You can tell your kids this one.)
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