I once had an office on the top floor of building that in the early 1900’s had housed a brothel frequented by those working in the City Hall across the street. When I was there it had a window air conditioner that contained a dead bird. Bad timing.
You can, if you dare, click here for the other losers… er, um… contestants.
The winner — if you can call it winning — of the Wired News saddest-cubicles contest is David Gunnells, an IT guy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His desk is penned in by heavily used filing cabinets in a windowless conference room, near a poorly ventilated bathroom and a microwave. The overhead light doesn’t work — his mother-in-law was so saddened by his cube that she gave him a lamp — and the other side of the wall is a parking garage. Gunnells recalls a day when one co-worker reheated catfish in the microwave, while another used the bathroom and covered the smell with a stinky air freshener. Lovely.
Yikes!
I’ve worked for a few firms with the same sort of scene. Notice it’s often the IT guy who’s given the short shrift.
Most telling though, look at number of places with wires all over the floor, $20 linksys boxes for the lan and daisy chained power strips… Scary stuff…
You forgot Dick DeBartolo’s cubicle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuPT2Tg1T5Q
(scroll to 1:00)
Reminded me of “Joe vs. the Volcano”
Please…my last job gave me a port-hole size monitor and an old Pentium 4 class cpu with hyper-threading turned off for some bizarre reason…I would have killed for the 24 inch screen on that guys desk…I could care less if I am on a card table…
What’s wrong with that cubicle? I’ve seen studio apartments in New York smaller than that.
HA! My old boss at the prepared foods division of a local grocery store chain made his “office” space under the stairs just in back of our kitchen. A couple of tall two door cabinets to frame the entrance, a desk that was to be thrown out, a pilfred microwave that was destined for one of the stores…. just wished i could have found an old ‘people under the stairs’ movie poster to grace it with..
IT guys aren’t the only ones (things) who suffer cramped conditions. Even IT servers, in some buildings, get shoved into unair-conditioned closets. My brother-inlaw, tells me of where he works as an Oracle IT tech. That most of the servers in his building wouldn’t work 24/7 because they’d shut off the air-conditioning after office hours, and the closets they were crammed into would overheat. Then one day it all got better, because some new brass wanted his office aquarium to stay cool. So the A/C stayed on around the clock. Wa-la! The servers no longer fried at night. But just to make some pet fish comfortable, though. That’s how much state/county bureaucrats care about high tech equipment safety.
Uhhh… Dave…. What did you do that deserved a dead bird a/c?