Self-Helpless: True Tales of a Working Girl: Cubicle Life

1/04/2007

Cubicle Life - In Stealth Mode

After all this time of tracking bat-$#@%-crazy managers and bringing to light the idiocy that corporate management inflicts on the lower ranks, I might have to pause and shift focus in a different direction for a little while.

Whenever I submit a blog article to Digg.com, or some other social book marking site, other “related” stories tend to crop up. One of them that came up this week was ”Cubicle Hacks”.

While I found the article written in a style similar to my own caustic, witty, and irreverent voice (which is probably why I liked it), something made me pause at the end of it. Then it came to me: it wasn’t the article that made me stop, it was the bevy of readers’ comments at the end of it.

Mr. Urban Monarch describes 5 things to ease life in cubicle hell. All of them save one (I have shared your pain over the miserable cup o’joe in the office… thus I started drinking tea) were about how to get away with not doing what they were there to do… the job! However, as I said, it wasn’t the article itself that bothered me – I laughed, I cried, it made me want to try some new tricks back in cube hell but… oh wait – it didn’t persuade me quite that much. It was funny and right up my alley – I had a good laugh.

Then I read the comments that followed. Here I go crusading against incompetent (ok, stupid) bosses, and I see something like this. I KNOW that everybody goes online at some point to handle personal business during work hours (it’s totally naïve to believe otherwise) – or to check the weather or read the latest headlines on CNN… whatever. But these comments suggested a complete slacker attitude – and it made me feel that they deserved whatever micromanagement they had coming to them.

Perhaps too it’s an age thing. “Highly seasoned veterans” don’t carry on like that… and if they do, well then maybe those are the managers I have talked about. It didn’t seem that way to me though. These comments sounded like they came from internet-savvy Gen Y cube dwellers that should get used to the close confinement their little space offers them… with those tactics they’ll have a hard time moving up.

# posted by The Pied Piper @ 10:41 PM

Comments:

You're right, if those folks are slacking they are in for a surprise. I see those sites about office warfare and playing pranks on people and I think not only is that childish, if I were to do that I would definitely get fired.

KubeLife.com

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