On Cubicle Etiquette, or…STOP FARTING!!!

I work in your typical engineering environment, which means that unless you are of a certain higher level, you work out of a cubicle. Most cubes are about 8’ square, or 64 square feet. Because I am higher up the food chain, my cube is 8’ x 12’.  A senior manager has a larger cube as well as a turnaround desk and a closet. Im not sure what the closet is for since no one wears a jacket or coat anymore.

Gangsta!

I’ve worked in cubes with tall walls, and seen people working in 5’ x 5’ cubes with 36 inch high walls. At one time I had an office with a ceiling and a door…that closed. There are some in my office that work in “bullpens” where four workers each have a corner of one big cube with a desk in the middle.



Roomy

For comparison, the average prison cell in the US is 6 x 8 feet.  

If you stand on your chair and look over the wall it looks the stockyards near where I grew up. Row upon row of cubes inhabited by bipedal ruminants, chewing their corporate cuds and spitting out nonsense.  Mindless drones posed in front of LCDs, illuminated by fluorescent kill lights doing everything they can to endure the lack of privacy.

You gotta problem?

In this environment, much like prison, you are thrown into a close quarters situation with  people you don’t know, and don’t care to know. Etiquette and unwritten rules abound. In prison (or in Council Bluffs, Iowa) you don’t make eye contact for too long lest the other person believe you want to fight. Likewise, in the corporate world there are unwritten rules based on the need to share space.

Conference Calls

Few things piss me off more than the idiot who takes a conference call from his cube. If you think listening to someone’s conversation on a mobile phone is annoying, try listening to some asshat in his cube yakking away on a conference call. These sociopathic assholes  blather on and on punctuating their conversation with a phony hardy chuckle or laugh. Even worse, they will put the other party on the speaker so that everyone can hear just how important these enema bags are. It’s as if they want people to complain so that they can claim they are important enough for an office. How I wish I could use Maxwell Smart’s Cone of Silence. Actually I’d rather use Patrick Bateman’s Plastic Exit Bag to suffocate them.

Rule #1: Take the call in a conference room or just shut the fuck up!

Oh how I hate you!

Private Calls

The veal pen environment leaves you with zero privacy. I am roughly eight feet from a person in any of the Cardinal directions. This means I am privy to all of their conversation, no matter how personal. I hear them speaking to their doctors about their prostrate, I hear them talking with their elderly fathers in the nursing home and I hear them talking to their wives about all manner of things. If I need to make a private call, I use my mobile. I personally don’t care what they are up to, I just don’t want them to know my business.

Rule #2: Take the call on your mobile somewhere other than your cube, or shut the fuck up!

Nom, Nom, Nom

Eating
Oy, the eating! We Americans work too much. Scratch that. We spend too many hours in the office. We eat lunch at our desks and some of us eat breakfast at our desk. I’m guilty of occasionally grabbing a nosh at our cafeteria and eating at my desk. We all do it. But when it comes to eating at your desk, there are two things that piss people off more than anything: Loud eaters and smelly food.

Loud eaters go way beyond the occasional lip smacking annoyances, they are aural terrorists, clanking and scraping and slurping their way through their meal like they had just been rescued from two weeks in a lifeboat with no one to eat. I try to quietly. Thanks to the Missus I know exactly how noisy Stacy’s Pita Chips really are. She claims that when I eat them I sound like an overloaded wood chipper. Some people though, insist on consuming an entire bag of Kettle cooked chips while slurping soda from their 64oz handkeg. It just makes me want to stab them with their own fork.

Mmmmm Cubicle Bear smells Thai food

Smellly food just sucks. In the engineering world, you have people from all over the world eating things that smell strange to us but delicious to them. I like exotic food within reason. I like Indian, Pho, Greek, Persian and Thai, but some of it smells like ass. The worst smelling stuff comes from Dickey’s BBQ. Some of the foulest smelling BBQ I have ever been forced to smell. I imagine some people are turned off by American food, like he smell of a char-grilled burger to a Hindu, or bacon to a Muslim. I’ve never asked any of my friends if the smell of American food bothers them. So, if you’re eating smelly food, take it somewhere with better ventilation.

Rule #3: Don’t eat loud food

Rule #4: Drag your ass out of bed early enough to eat at home

Rule #5: Don’t eat smelly food of any type, or shut the fuck up!

Mobile Phones

Everyone has a mobile phone but some people seem to forget that they are mobile. They leave them on their desk when they go to a meeting and eventually their overwatched and understimulated child calls and I am forced to listen to the stupid ringtone they find “cute.” One VP has Bad to the Bone as a ringtone, which is equivalent to Justin Bieber having Ace of Spades as his. Every time I hear it I laugh (to myself of course, I’m not an idiot.) One guy has Cinderella by some Chapman guy as his wife’s ringtone. It’s a maudlin, saccharine piece of musical detritus that makes me want to stab him in his eardrums.

Rule #6: Don’t leave your phone on your desk

Rule #7: Put your phone on vibrate so we don’t have to listen to your fucktards ringtone or

Shut the fuck up!

WTF are you doing here, bitch?

Sickness

For some reason, people think they need to come to work when they are sick. Now, I’m exempting those people who work hourly jobs because if they don’t work they don’t get paid.

However, in my office we get plenty of sick leave so there’s no excuse. I swear to God that if one more motherfucker shows up coughing up a lung, I’m going to reach down their throat and pull one out. You know the people I’m talking about. They think the world can’t go on without them so they come in fully infected with Ebola. In reality, they don’t want to use their sick leave. Time and again I’ve told people: Stay at home if you sound like you have something that is communicable. Maybe I should have used easier words to understand, like: If you’re hacking anything up or have a fever, stay the fuck at home!

Rule #8: If you’re sick, stay the fuck at home!

Farting

I’ve saved the best for last. One of the reasons we work in “flexible offices spaces” or whatever the fuck you want to call it, is that it’s cheaper to run the HVAC systems when developing the space. With that in mind, the air becomes a shared resource, and not a very good one. I’m old enough to remember when airplanes had a smoking section. It was usually about ten rows in the middle of the plane. What a fucking joke. The smoke went everywhere, but somehow the airlines were convinced they had solved the problem. I’m also old enough to remember when you could smoke in the office. I only caught the tail end of that but I can still remember smelling of stale cigarette smoke when I emerged from the VPs office.

Today there is a menace much worse and far nastier. A menace that, unlike cigarette smoke, is invisible to the naked eye, yet packs a smell that sickens. It creeps along on little cat feet assaulting the olfactory functions on anyone it touches. It is: Farting. As I write this, someone (I know who ) has farted. They are stealth farters, silently introducing their intestinal Zyklon B into the atmosphere like an Olympic diver. They think no one is on to them, but everyone knows. The Missus tells me I should stand up and yell “what stinks” but I can’t do it. The cubicle culture emasculates us and forces us to play nice too often.

Everyone knows the foods that cause their flatulence. Therefore, they should avoid eating them while at work. Eat them at home where you can walk around your house farting like a train horn and basking in the ambiance. Go crazy and wait until you’re in bed and fart under the sheets so that your partner doesn’t know until they move the covers. Walk around in a store spreading those SBD farts like a human cropduster. Knock yourself out, just don’t do it at work.

Rule #9: STOP FARTING!!!!!