ALT-5 Pros and Cons of Cubicles

From 3arf

The Cubicle Jungle, Cube Farm, the Cubicle Corral, the Land of Cloth and Steel Walls, Cube Nation. All names for the ubiquitous office phenomenon of workspaces created by propping movable, chest-high walls together in squares. Usually, there is just enough room for a desk, chair, computer and file cabinet. This is the kind of place in which so many of us spend forty or more hours of our lives. With so many businesses using them, they must be a good idea, right? Let's take a few minutes to look at the pros and cons of this modern workplace environment that so many of us call our home away from home.

PROS

1. Cloth walls are perfect for push pins. Once when my department moved into a brand new office space, they told us not to tack up anything because the paper would reduce the sound dampening effects of the cloth and foam. Yeah, right! That mandate lasted all of about one day. Those soft, spongy walls were just begging to have multicolored, plastic-headed pins stuck in them with everything from calendars to Dilbert cartoons. So, so long noise reduction.

2. They remind you of the cardboard forts we built as kids. "Look out! Here come the corporate raiders to steal all of our gold!"

3. They are ecologically friendly. Mountains of steel, cotton and polyurethane are saved every year by using walls that only go halfway to the ceiling.

4. Four people can be crowded into a space that used to be used for one. This also saves the company on the number of printers they have to buy. Just stick one tiny printer in the middle of a cubicle pod for 16 people. Quick! Run to the printer to snag that confidential employee status report before the other fifteen people read it!

5. You can throw things at coworkers and they don't know where it came from. When someone says something stupid like, "I wonder how much the company could save by making us share one stapler placed next to the common printer?", you can anonymously sling a plastic fork at him.

6. They give a whole new meaning to the term, "thinking outside the box". Just step into the aisle to do all of your deep thinking.

CONS

1. Lack of privacy. Cubicles seriously enhance the level of office gossip. I know when all my coworkers have car problems, home repair problems, kid problems, and marital problems. Way to much information.

2. It is a lot harder to surf the Internet in peace than in an office. You have to be ready to click on something to hide your YouTube site too often for it to be fun in a cubicle. Besides, after seeing you read the same email for about an hour, the boss starts to get a little suspicious.

3. Background noise level. Do you ever stop and just listen to the constant buzz and chatter that can be heard at any given moment in the Cubicle Jungle? This is same kind of torture that they use on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to break down their resistance to taking orders and providing information on command. I guess we know where they did the field trials for the military, huh?

4. Prairie Dog syndrome: whenever there's a strange sound, voice or even smell on the floor, a gazillion heads pop up over the cubicle walls like prairie dogs peeping out of their desert holes. I wonder if companies can actually track the dip in productivity when someone burns microwave popcorn in the break room and all the "prairie dogs" pop up to see who did it.

It looks like the pros outweigh the cons for the company, so I guess Cube Nation is here to stay. I just can't wait until by boss retires and I can lay claim to his corner cubicle near the window.

Related Articles

Retrieved from "https://3arf.org/en/index.php?title=ALT-5_Pros_and_Cons_of_Cubicles&oldid=14566"