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…