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.