Sunday, August 26, 2007

The insubordinate igloo

Facts relevant to this story:

1. My company finally finished building their new expansion enough for my department to move to the second floor.
2. Instead of an open-concept plan like a newspaper's bullpen, we are now in a cube farm with 6-foot high walls.
3. There is a constant cool breeze from somewhere unknown that makes it very cold in my cube. Of my four cubemates, three of us are always wearing a jacket. A thermometer may indicate it is 19C but coupled with a 9 km/h breeze, it makes for very cold 8-hour days. There are some days where I am wearing a fleece jacket and a shell. I can feel a constant wind on my head and my notes wave in the gentle breeze.

The new cube layout made it difficult for anyone to find anyone else. In the old space, if you needed to find someone you looked around. Even a month later, everyone is still a little unsure where everyone else sits. To remedy this problem,people started labelling their cubes. We put up a sign that said "Welcome to the Igloo Quad" and then all our names. Cute, harmless, and utterly lacking in Comic Sans. In other words, typical cube humour.

This sign has been up for a month, drawing very little attention to itself. Other quads have put up post-it notes and the electrical engineers put up a sign titled "Lightning Lane" and call out to Nikola Tesla.

This week, my co-worker was called into an engineering director's office told to take down our sign. He didn't have a problem with it but he was told some on our floor found it "insubordinate" and "insulting". We're all a little dumbfounded.

And now, no one can find us because our sign is gone. We'll probably have a hard time finding something that is non-threatening.

I was thinking a unicorn but someone might find its horn too pointy.

3 comments:

gary said...

This is just a hunch, but do you have a Inuit co-worker with spinal damage?

They might think, "Welcome to the Igloo Quad" is insulting.

Anonymous said...

Oh my gosh, that sounds like it came from an episode of The Office. It's real, it's really real, agghh! ~Marilyn

Ryan said...

You definitely need to replace your cube sign. I suppose "The Ice Cube" is a little too obvious. Being the kind person I am (and very bored at work), here are some suggestions:

- Frozen Ass Lane
- Iceberg Alley
- Polar Bear Town
- WTF1SC0LdH3r3!1
- Frozen Wasteland of Cube-urbia