Tales from the Cube Farm is a new series where I write / rant about some of the people and issues I deal with at my job. For their protection, I’ve changed the names of the guilty.

My Stress is not a Comedy
I came into work this morning and dove right into emails only to find a lot of confusion and frustration. Being it’s pretty early in the morning, I tend to just vent to the monitor and get it out of my system. A co-worker wandered by and asked how I was doing. “Not good”, I replied, “I’m tired of people not reading what I write”. “Well, you should just relax and get happy!” Look, you might not be dealing with idiots first thing in the morning, so you don’t understand my frustration. It’s not hard to copy/paste commands from an email into a terminal. At any rate, the co-worker annoyed me to no end with the “You should get happy” mantra. Let me vent, let me get it out and I’ll be fine, but ten minutes later, the same co-worker stops by and asks if it’s getting better. “No, it’s not” I respond. My response got a laugh from the co-worker who again told me I should be patient and understanding in these matters. Patience and understanding is one thing, but laughing at my stress just serves to aggrevate me more. I guess if this person were in my department they’d realize what we deal with here.

Just because you’re old school doesn’t mean I am
A few weeks ago I brought Bethany into the office with Emma for a visit. The visit went fine, and my coworkers were happy to see my love and my child, which was cool. A couple of days later, I came across my boss in the hallway and got to talking about him and the upcoming trip to get married. He turns to the receptionist (whom we shall call OnE for Old and Evil) and mentioned that I was getting married to her. Her response? “Well, I guess they don’t have a choice since they have a child together”. It took me back a bit and I went to sit in my cube. I thought about that comment for a while, and it upset me a bit. Ok, so we had a child before we were married. Nevermind the fact that we were getting married anyway, or that maybe.. just maybe we loved each other and that was why we were getting married.

Religious implications
Here at the office, I have some rather religious co-workers, a couple of which are in my group. I have no problems with people believing what they want to, but I do have a problem with people trying to sway me to their side, or trying to ’show me the power of Jesus’. I used to go to church when I was younger, but I eventually got tired of it and outgrew it. Since then, I haven’t really searched for a religion as I don’t feel I need one to be complete. At any rate, one morning I’m sitting in my cubicle when one of my co-workers begins a speech about ‘how God has a plan for everyone, how great God is and how powerful he is’. Unfortunately since I’m the first one on the team in the building, I usually get to hear it first, then I get to hear another rendition later on during the morning. I smile and nod, giving the occasional ‘uh-huh’ in hopes that it would soon be over. Part of me wants to sit in my cube and utter “hail Satan” every once in a while, but the last thing I need is to start a holy war.