My cubicle runs on magnets. Those little rare-earth monsters smaller than your pupil that pull a couple of pounds each. I order them off the web. It's like Magnetic Christmas when they arrive.

The company where I work, you see, decided last winter to build out the office with fancy new cubicles. I don't like cubes, but I've worked in them before. I can deal. At least, I consoled myself, I'll have some personal wall space to hang printouts and white boards and whatnot. And padded walls absorb sound nicely. I do value privacy.

So we worked from home for a week while the office got renovated. And came back to find this:



Turns out we're the proud new owners of genuine Herman Miller designer cubes. My Studio Environments they're called. No padded walls here. These puppies are all curves and rectangles and steel tubes and frosted glass. I don't know the exact numbers, but I'm confident the list price of just one would make a respectable down payment on a Lear jet. I give all props to our execs for going top-of-the-line. With all sincerity, this is an awesome company to work for.

Also, I hated these cubes on sight.

I mean sure, they have doors. That's extremely cool. But they look and feel like plastic shower doors. In fact the frosted glass between cubes is quite a bit like a translucent shower partition. Nothing personal against my coworkers, but that's not the mental image I need when I drag into work Monday morning. "Permeable privacy" the brochure calls it. "Parabolic sound reflector" is more appropriate, considering all the smooth, curved surfaces. "Alien spaceship," "dog pound" and "cryogenic pod" have also come up more than once.

In case any of my company execs are reading this, let me be clear: the cubes have grown on me since then. Compared to neutral-toned cloth boxes, these are very stylish and pleasant to the eye. I appreciate now what the designer achieved. But they are, and shall always remain, quite absurd.

Riddle me this, Batman: How do you hang printouts on a glass surface? Tape? Suction cups? It took me awhile to figure it out: magnets. Put one on each side of the glass and the paper is pinned between them. This was a liberating discovery. Turns out magnets also work great to attach things to metal tubes and plastic cabinet doors. (In the photo below, pictures are hung inside the cabinet.) These rare-earth jobs are even strong enough to penetrate my pressboard desktop. I'm all about magnets now. They also make a fun stress relief toy.



Unfortunately they're not strong enough to hold up a white board. Solution? Frosted glass and plastic doors make decent dry erase surfaces. I've worked double shifts where my cube looked like a madman's room in a horror movie, covered top to bottom with half-decipherable scrawls.

No doubt Herman Miller and my coworkers would find that an apt comparison. Maybe I am insane. No one else in the office has blanketed their stylish glass box with scribbles and magnets and loose papers. Why is that? Am I a trendsetter or just a freak? Honestly, I can live with both.

I'm only getting started anyway. Along with our new cubes came these slick double-swing-arm mounts for LCD monitors. I didn't attach monitors to mine. I screwed on more white boards. Magnetic, of course. Who else can rotate their white boards to any angle on three axes at a whim? No one, that's who else! In fact I'm in the throes of what you might call a "cube mod." The details will have to wait for another post, but it's become one of those creative obsessions that won't stop until my children notice their college fund is shrinking. I get the most satisfying looks of bewilderment from janitors and cubicle maintenance guys.



Yes, we have cubicle maintenance guys. I enjoy their visits. In fact I'm thoroughly enjoying this whole experience. Despite my initial misgivings, I couldn't be happier that we moved into these weird overstyled beauties. Maybe rebellion is the mother of invention. Or maybe I need to get out more.

Nah, it's definitely rebellion. Right?