Tinker, Tailor

I was scolding a friend on MSN.

Me: i’m starting to figure that u don’t have the balls

Friend: ……

Me: YOU HAVE NO BALLS!!!

For some reason, my friend didn’t seem to mind. Such a nice friend she is.

The nice clerk at the office comes by our cubicle farm every afternoon to feed us with non-electronic mail.

Since I’m not very important, I don’t usually get any mail, but these past few days have been different because I actually got mail for about 4 consecutive days. Wooohoooo!

When I’m inside my cubicle, she just hands me the mail, and I thank her. No problem.

Things get a little more tricky for her when I’m not around, because she’s not quite sure where to put my mail.

You see, my company issues out those plastic in-trays and out-trays, but I didn’t take them because
1) I don’t have much use for them (I thought), since my work is mostly done electronically,
2) there’s no more space left on my cubicle desk.

Since I don’t have an in-tray or inbox (I think the name inbox in email has office cubicle origins), the clerk has to decide where to put my mail. This is probably what goes through her mind as she holds the envelope and surveys my cubicle:

Now where the hell should I put this? The main desk is filled with equipment and books… this side table is filled with books and junk… the top of this shelf is filled with stuff… maybe I’ll just put it on the keyboard, since it’s the largest flat surface area around. Heck, I’ll just put it on his chair!

Clerks have difficult decisions to make.

Anyway, I soon realised that the mail I’ve been getting was not from people who love me (boohooo!), but they were the offline version of spam.

With a bit of thinking, I figured a way to solve everyone’s problem, and make the world a better place. Or at least make my workplace a better place.

I arrived at the cubicle farm early this morning, relatively speaking. Technically speaking I would have been considered late, but because everyone else in my farm hadn’t arrived, I was early. (This explains why I’m so tired now.)

The cleaner came round the cubicles to collect the trash, and she stopped at my cubicle while I pressed the button on my Toshiba.

“You’re new here?” she asks in mandarin.

“I just moved here not too long ago,” I reply in mandarin, wondering why the dumb Toshiba hasn’t awaken.

“It’s most important to get along with your colleagues,” she advises.

I have this bad feeling that she has more pearls of wisdom to cast if I feign interest, yet I don’t want to be rude. “Yes, I get along with them.” I hit a few random keys on the keyboard. No response.

“You know, I used to work at [department A]…” she continues as I note that the status lights of the stupid Toshiba is normal. Let’s see if Ctrl+Alt+Del has any effect.

“Boy ah, you know, it’s most important to be HAPPY at work.” She says “HAPPY” in english.

“Yes, that’s right,” I affirm, hoping that it makes her happy, and perhaps she’ll leave me alone soon.

“You know, I worked at [the CEO’s office area],” she begins again, and I actually listen, hoping to catch some juicy bit of gossip about the CEO. “The people there are very nice - whenever they have meetings, they would pack some of the refreshments for me. And the refreshments are not the cheap kind - each item costs at least 50 cents! I was very HAPPY there.”

I look back at the darned Toshiba. Should I do a hardware reset?

“Then I was at [department B],” this time in a sadder tone. I notice she has black hair, even though she’s probably around 65. “The people there are no good. I wasn’t HAPPY.” Should someone on a bus or MRT give up their seat to someone who’s obviously old but tries to look young?

“I told my supervisor that I wanted to resign, because I wasn’t HAPPY.” Friggin Toshiba. I think I’ll just reset. “So they transferred me.”

Then, the Toshiba finally decides to wake up, and the cleaner, somehow sensing it, limps on to the next cubicle.

“Boy ah, it’s most important to be happy…” she mutters, probably to me.

(Lame-o-meter reading: HIGH)

I was at the bus stop in the evening when this middle-aged Caucasian guy came up to me.

“Do you have any matches?” In his hand was a cigarette.

“Nobody uses matches these days, I thought.”

“Okay, do you have a lighter?”

“I don’t smoke.”

He must have rolled his eyes.

“Besides, it’s illegal to smoke at bus stops now,” I added.

“You kidding me? Two guys were smoking here just now!”

“Anyway, it is illegal. I don’t know - if you get caught, you might get fined, or even whupped.”

“You’re not gonna turn me in are you? Or are you some guy from the secret police?”

“I’m not supposed to say,” I confided with a sly smile. “But I can be bribed.”

“Huh huh you’re just some high school student out to make a quick buck!”

People say strange things when the bus takes too long to arrive.

P.S. He couldn’t believe it when I told him my age.

Venue: Lasalle College of the Arts (check out the map), Studio Theatre (ground floor of Performing Arts Block)
Date: Wednesday, 22nd of March (TODAY)
Time: 6.00pm

It’s open to public, so if you’re interested in Creative Commons, you have no choice but to go. If you don’t know what Creative Commons is about, you have to go too.

Here’s more info on Colin Mutchler’s site. Colin’s the guy doing the show.

I’ll be there, so feel free to say “hi” to me, assuming you know who I am. Hurhurhur.

P.S. This reminds me - I have yet to put my Creative Commons sticker on my blog. Will do it soon! Really!

I popped by the Singapore Art Museum last weekend by chance and stumbled upon a special exhibition, Cubism in Asia.

If you like art, make immediate plans to go, because the exhibition ends 9 April this year, and you’ll may feel suicidal if you miss it.

Also, check out my post (with a couple of pictures), Cubism in Asia, which I wrote for yesterday.sg.

Since moving into the cubicle farm, I have been feeling a little constrained, not just because of the cubicle, but because outlets for creative expression have been limited. Grafitti seems to be out of the question at the moment, and I haven’t had the time nor mood to design new posters.

A colleague who moved with me into the cubicle farm was also expressing similar concerns, so we started figuring out what to do to improve the situation. We figured needed a space which allowed anyone to create and edit content freely - we needed a wiki.

We got our wiki just the other night when no one else was around. It’s a low-power always-on high-resolution editable pen-input wiki space (my less sophisticated colleagues call it a ‘whiteboard’).

I am so pleased.

I was playing in a 3-on-3 basketball tournament not too long ago.

In our first game, my team mates didn’t play well, but I did, so we were comfortably ahead of our opponents.

Then towards the end of that game, as I was going for a layup, the guy guarding me poked my left eye.

It didn’t hurt, but as I stood there blinking, I realised I had lost my left contact lens. (Yes, I am myopic because I read too much.)

I turned and started looking for my lens on the court floor. The guy who poked me came over to apologise but I ignored him because I was looking for my lens.

He must have thought I was angry with him, so he apologised more. He even moved in front of me and held my shoulder to show his sincerity.

Then I saw my lens.

Right before he stepped on it.

AAAAAAAARRRRRGGGHHHHHH!!!!

It was downhill from there. We managed to win that first game, but we lost the other 2 games, and thus got poked out of the tournament.

I was upset for some time over how the tournament turned out, until I read about this basketball player who got his eye poked out of it’s socket.

I am no longer upset about the tournament.

P.S. I was so disturbed by the incident described in the article that I had to skip over some of the details. I can’t even write properly now. And I’m not the type that’s easily grossed out.

In a cubicle farm, it’s sometimes hard to speak to a colleague in a nearby cubicle because you don’t want to disturb the other farm animals, so you have to resort to MSN messenger.

Anyway, this lady from another part of the department came to our cubicle farm, looking for volunteers to do some silly stuff. Ok, a lot of what we have to do is silly, but this time it’s really silly. I popped an MSN message to warn my colleague:

Me: she’s here to recruit people for [the silly thingy]

Colleague: lets hide

Me: put on headphones

Colleague: lets go for a meeting

Me: let’s call each other on the phone

She left without bugging us.

Yes, cubicle life can be quite exciting at times.

P.S. Okay, okay, I’ll try not to mention cubicles in my next post!

Today is π (pi) day, so I shall take a break from my anti-cubicle posts.

π day is on the 14th of March (3-14, American style), based on the first 3 digits of π (duh).

I used to admire those guys who had nothing better to do than to memorise too many digits of π, so one day I decided to memorise it too. 3.141592654. I had to stop at the 10 most significant digits because the scientific calculator I had gave only those 10 digits. But that was good enough to impress my friends. You see, most people don’t know anything beyond the 6th digit, so if you can blurt out the first 10 digits confidently, and you can stay consistent with your confidence, by the time you reach the 20th (fictitious) digit, they’d beg you to stop, because you’ve proven beyond all doubt that you can recite the first 100 digits.

Ok. Back to cubicle life.

P.S. To my pedantic readers, yes, I know that the 10th digit of π is 3 and not 4. I put 4 because the calculator displays a 4, because of rounding.

The cubicle I’m now in is the low kind, which is about chest-high, unless you’re Yao Ming, in which case it would be around your waist level. But if you’re Yao Ming, you shouldn’t be reading this - you should be trying to improve your sucky basketball skills.

As I was saying, I’m in the low type of cubicle. Which implies that there is the high kind. The high-ranking people in my department get the high cubicles, while we lower corporate life forms are left to fester in the low ones.

Truth be told, I’d rather be in a low cubicle. But I prefer not to have any cubicles at all. Unless, of course, it’s during those 10 minutes or so when I’m clearing my mind and my anal retention…

Speaking of the toilet cubicle, it really offers slightly more privacy than the high cubicles. During those 10 minutes or so while I’m minding my own business, I would sometimes hear someone enter the next cubicle. Then I hear the door bang shut. Then the seat goes down. The loosening of the belt buckle. Pants pulled down. Bum hits seat. Long, wet fart. Squirt-splat, squirt-splat, interrupted by occasional grunt. Sigh of relief. Toilet paper ripped. Pants up. Zip. Belt buckle. Flussshh! (The smell remains more or less constant throughout.) During these times, my mind gets clouded instead of cleared…

Inside a high office cubicle, there may be lots of visual privacy, but that’s about all. This is really worse than having no cubicle at all, where everyone is visible to everyone else. In the latter case, I can at least assess the amount of privacy I have, so that I know when it’s safe to gossip about the boss’s affair with the new janitor. In a high cubicle, you can’t see if there’s anyone on the other side of the partition. If you’re unlucky, the boss or the new janitor might just be outside listening in…

Cubicles are evil. But high cubicles are eviler.

Update: Fortune recently had an article on the history of cubicles - Cubicles: The great mistake.

“Guess which is my cubicle?”

A colleague happened to be at my department, so I decided to show her my brand new cubicle. As I led her to the cubicle farm, I asked her to guess my cubicle.

“There - this one! The messiest one lor!” she declared loudly the moment she looked into one of the cubicles, and nothing was going to change her mind - not even the truth.

I shook my head and let out a sigh. I felt so misunderstood, I didn’t even bother trying to change her perception of me.

But dang, it was my cubicle.

* * * * *

I get this distinct feeling that someone is asking me not to complain about cubicle life:

Modern day workers are mostly well acquainted to cubicle life. Already we complain when we spend our 9-5 in square boxes. What if, just what if, we had to eat, sleep, change in our cubicles?

After eons of valiant resistance, I’ve finally succumbed to the inexorable dark forces of the empire - I’ve been banished from an office room into a cubicle.

Cubicles are evil.

Not like I’ve worked in them before - my only experience with cubicles before this exile were those 10 minutes or so of every afternoon spent in clearing my mind and more importantly my anal retention (literally)…

Unlike the typical cubicle you see around the empire where I serve, my previous office rooms had character. We had posters - not those blah courage or teamwork ones - we created posters of heroes - heroes like Kim Jong Il and Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. I contemplated adding posters of our Minister Mentor as well as our emporer (the CEO), but that never materialised (might have gotten that promotion if I did). We also had communist flags hanging from the ceiling (later taken down because of complaints). There was a time when we even had grafitti on our walls!

But most of all, it was messy. Books boxes equipment folders papers wires clothes shoes balls books boxes equipment… I didn’t even have space on my table for my office telephone, so I suspended it in mid-air by hanging it from the ceiling with an old ethernet cable. It looked so cool.

Unfortunately, my department head had different notions of cool. He came in for a visit one day so I pretended to work, pretending that nothing was amiss, while knowing full well that he was staring at my elegant solution and thinking of what to say.

“Why is your telephone hanging there?” he finally managed to say.

“Well,” I made a show of looking around at my desk, “I don’t know where else to put it.”

He looked around too, trying very hard to find some available space. I waited for him to give up.

“You shouldn’t hang it there - it’s not very presentable,” he blurted out with great restraint. “Try to do something about it.”

He really meant “you’d better do something about it or I’m so gonna fire you”, so I promised to find a solution.

He came back several days later, and was pleased to note that my phone wasn’t suspended from the ceiling anymore. I’m sure he was trying to spot the phone on my desk, and he would have been unsuccessful. If only he looked under the desk, on the floor…

Now, the telephone is sitting on my cubicle desk. The cubicle is relatively large, with lots of flat surfaces, so my telephone gets to sit on the desk for now.

And here I sit, staring into the blank partition wall of my cubicle, missing those days outside the cubicle…