Time Warp in Beanie Land

I'm not sure what sort of time-warping energy field generator they have surrounding the buildings here, but somehow they manage to make the 9 hours I spend at work go by about 6 times slower than the same 9 hours at home. I am pretty sure it is powered by the life-forces of the employees. I must find this device and destroy it.

As I was trudging to my desk this morning, scoping out the locked doors behind which this device might be stashed away, I also found myself wondering, "What the hell is up with these people who have their entire cube covered in 3 layers of personal, non-work-related crap?"

A while back there was a woman here whose cube must have had 300 beanie babies in it. This person had actually added a homemade wooden shelving unit. These space-saving shelves were obviously needed, judging by the sheer amount of useless shit stacked on them.

There wasn't one inch of wall space that wasn't covered with something. Family pictures, pictures of baby zoo animals, you name it. They must have been building the photo collection of one particular kid for quite some time, because if you stacked the pictures, you could make a flip-book and watch the kid go from age 2 to age 20 right before your eyes.

To top it all off, they actually covered the cube walls with bright green, pink and gold-striped wrapping paper. Seriously, this cube looked like the inside of an effing piñata. I could barely stand to walk past it on a Monday morning let alone spend my entire working life trapped inside this cheerful abomination. It was so over the top it made me want to vomit miniature teddy bears.

If this person ever got laid off, it would take her a solid 8-hour shift to box this shit up and haul it to her car (which I am sure has its own collection of bobbleheads and beanie babies gracing the rear deck.) I can only imagine what her house looks like.

On the flip side, there are other cubes here that are totally monastic in appearance. Other than a computer, and a calendar, and maybe a pen or two, there is nothing else. Completely blank walls. Completely clean desktop. If you walked by you would think that nobody worked there.

I have a theory on this. Either this person has achieved complete enlightenment and is living the Zen Buddhist worklife, or they think that they have one foot out the door and it'll be easier if there's no shit to box up. Maybe both. Either way, I aspire to this goal. Right now, my cube is a mess. Not so much with props and pictures, although there are a few, but mostly because of the useless piles of paper that I print out and promptly forget about.

Eventually, these stacks of paper reach immense proportions, and every three months or so I simply throw the bottom half out. At the same time, I usually weed the row of post-it notes tacked to my overhead cabinet, because 9 times out of ten, whatever is written on them is totally incomprehensible. So far that approach has worked well for me. I may try to boost my productivity and chuck the bottom two-thirds next time. We'll see how that goes.

Here's an example of one post-it note I just tossed. It says:

2260923
Lumpkin - BULIC
HR TTFEME
0662JXBV

I'm thinking it might be something Shamus wrote before he left.

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PS: OK, who has my 2002 Peter Gabriel concert DVD? I am also missing Birdy, Diggstown, and the second season of Family Guy. I have a really bad habit of loaning stuff out, and then forgetting who the hell it was that I loaned it to. I do the same thing with books and CDs. I seriously gotta start writing this crap down. Either that, or simply stop forcing my favorite movies, books and music on people. I think I am probably on my 4th or 5th copy of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," and at least my third copy of Kevin Gilbert's "Thud" CD. So if any of y'all have any of my shit, give it back, will ya?