Are you stuck in a cube farm? If so – do you like it? I’m pretty sure if the work was interesting I wouldn’t mind a cube farm. Particularly if I could personalize it to some extent.
Wouldn’t it be cool to have a ‘best dressed cubicle’ contest where people really went over the top, dressing up their cubicles with special lighting, or statues and wall fountains, and really cool stuff? I think if I were involved in something like that, I’d probably go with a Star Wars theme, complete with a light sabre, and radar detection when someone enters or leaves the cubicle.
I read a hilarious Dilbert Book called, “How to Enjoy work at the expense of your coworkers” or something like that, and it was chock full of the funniest anecdotes of things that people have done to one another, in cube farms. Like when someone has the annoying habit (when visiting the cube next to yours) of leaning on the partition, with their fingers over on your side, you paint a dot of white-out (that’s tippex for locals) on each fingernail. Or if they have an old fashioned telephone (still with twirly cord) how you could use a pipe-cleaner and tie the cord so that it’s really short, and the next time they try and answer the phone, they yank the whole phone off the desk.
Another funny one was, if there is an annoying person who always uses speaker phone, then you call in from your cell phone, and pretend to be from some random place like a str1p joint or s3x shop and loudly ask them when they’re coming to pick up their goods etc. Can you imagine how quickly that person will scramble to turn off the speaker phone (and probably never use it again)?
Anyway, I always think that your office environment is what you make of it, and providing you don’t work in some evil space where they don’t let you personalize it at all, have fun, and make it your home office away from home – you spend enough of your life there anyway!
Another thing that I believe makes for a good office environment, is one that invests in your education. Perhaps they send you on many training courses, or allow you to pursue mba programs whilst at work. Wouldn’t that be awesome?
