Revisiting the Cube Farm

A few years back I worked in a land called corporateland, sort of like Disneyland, but this world was filled with corporate mergers, great salaries, pink slip'd employees, casual dress fridays, low lighting, and my favorite, the cube farm. Ah, yes, the cube farm, with its fuzzy grey walls, and tight little quarters, the place that you do a game of Twister if you have more than yourself in your cube. If you were lucky your neighbor neither talked loud to her clients on the phone all day, nor ate really smelly foods that would float over to your cube too, and didn't play the Ketchup song to you every friday morning (Oh, I love that Ketchup song, I would have played it more too!) . You could put up pictures with those T-bar push pins, and try to break up the never ending horizon of grey with some colorful sprigs of inspirational quotes, that you could barely read in the low lighting of the cube farm cave. One learned how to navigate the cube farm after getting lost a few times, those of us who were tall could see the exit signs or bathrooms, but mostly you relied on little name badges on the cubes to get by, a left at Tom Jones, a right at Sue B, ooops, you went to Suri, you went too far, turn around. I thought I would never leave that place, until alas, I too was pink'd as well and landed in academia.