My Cubicle

I sit in a beige fabric cube. Across a beige carpet, sits another guy in a beige cube. He wears head-phones. I wear head-phones. We rarely speak.

There are three hanging steel cabinets in my cube. I have never used them, even though they are full.

I have five drawers. Two very large drawers, and three small drawers.  I have no clue what is in the large ones. The small top drawer, I use the most.

This drawer contains pens, nail-clippers, a glasses repair kit, stamps, nose spray, allergy medicine, Tylenol and a razor. I also keep there some old documents from my divorce. In short, the drawer contains things I rarely use, and things I wish to forget.

A large working surface sweeps in a quarter circle across my cube. On the far left, I pile papers I feel I should keep because they are important, but since the papers are not important to me, I ignore them and let the pile grow.

Further to the right is my telephone. I try not to use it, prefering instead to read and write email, rather than listen and speak because it is easier to re-write rather than re-speak a poorly formed sentence. Next is a coffee cup I got when my employer sent me to a class. I cannot recall what the class was about.  Neither can I recall when I last used the cup. I don't often drink the swill they brew in the lunch room.

In the center stands my computer monitor. It is exceptionally large because I have exceptionally lousy eyes. Floating across the light of my monitor is Outlook, a browser, and the windows media player I use to block the static of people around me by listening to classical music.

People's lives float across my monitor. There in the graceful arc of arrows and the pastel geometry of abstract symbols, people live and die. I rarely know them as people, only as actors in events. I only knew one of them, my sister, who was shot when her husband stopped the car at a traffic sign. She lost an eye, but has since recovered.

Behind me is the white board I use when I need to concentrate and think deeply about what I do.

© Greg Schiller, 2007

Author: Greg Schiller