The Corporate Desk

Growing up, I never thought much past college to what the work world looked like in its everyday details. I think the first time I really tried to visualize a cubicle was in my sophomore year of college when I read Savannah from Savannah and one scene described a cube farm. I was horrified. These gray boxes of people all crammed together—is that how it really worked? Was it claustrophobic? Was there no escape? Was that going to be my reality when I graduated? How terrifying and soul-crushing it sounded, like a padded trap.

Two weeks and five days ago, I packed up my corporate desk in my corporate cube yet again as I prepared to transition from work back to school. My cubicle was at the back of an aisle, so I had the wall of the building behind me, a cube wall to my right and in front of me, and a missing wall on the left that opened onto the aisle. The cubicle walls were taller than I, gray, padded, often covered with dark gray metallic overhead bins and whiteboards that reflected the indoor lights.

At first glance, that may seem like a padded trap, a corporate cage. However, the following is a list of things I packed or things I remembered as I packed, things that found a home at my desk in my cube over the summer:

• A pink post-it note with Help Desk and IT ticket numbers scribbled haphazardly across it
• Yellow to-do list post-it notes (sometimes two or three)
• A yellow post-it note with Bible verses
• A post-it note reminding me to remind my coworker to remind me to ask him a question
• A prank post-it love note (yes, you read that right)
• Two O’Reilly books borrowed from coworkers
• At least eight technical communication books
• One or two notebooks with scribbles, meeting notes, sketches, lists, questions, and a calendar
• At least seventeen whiteboard markers of various colors
• A CD player and stacks of CDs
• A photo of the Monkees
• A cartoon printed on printer paper about the death of the word “said”
• A Dilbert comic strip from a daily calendar
• Nerf darts
  • Orange with blue suction cup tips
  • Yellow with purple suction cup tips
  • Blue with red suction cup tips (these were the “cheap Russian ammo”)
  • Green with black criss-crossed Velcro
  • Orange with black heads that whistled when they soared
  • Orange with blunt orange tips
  • Blue with blunt tips
  • Yellow ones with no tips (the red suction cup tips had fallen off, so these were “blanks”)
  • One yellow one with “Elizabeth, I’m coming to join you” written in permanent marker on the side (apparently this is a Sanford and Son reference)

Yes. These items all found a home on my corporate desk at some point or another. This desk was my fifth permanent desk as a full-time employee, and while the particulars of the above list differed slightly per cubicle, the essence was the same. When I envisioned a padded trap, I did not envision these details. I think my desk held these eclectic items partly because of my specific office environment and partly because my desk is unique to me.

The type of environment I worked in is represented by a conversation I had with a coworker. I asked, “On a scale of Ewok to rancor, how intimidating is [coworker X]?” He replied that coworker X was probably around the R2-D2 level of the scale.

In a conference room, there were stuffed ponies and two plastic baseball bats, one orange and one blue. There were stuffed monkeys hanging from the ceiling in the cubicles near that conference room.

Most of the employees in my aisle and the aisle to my right kept at least one Nerf gun in their desks. We all developed an instinctive ducking reflex, as you could hear in the quiet professional hum the stealthy plastic click of a Nerf gun being cocked, perhaps a single pop of a fired dart. Soon metallic drawers quietly slid open, chairs shifted, more plastic clicks, and then Nerf darts rained from the sky as aisle battled aisle in a friendly exchange of Nerf darts. Laughter, squeals, whistling Nerf darts, darts bouncing off the ceiling, the occasional smack of a Nerf dart hitting a target. These battles lasted about five minutes, the guys standing to fire over cubicle walls or ducking to reload, sometimes even ducking to sneak around to the next aisle for a counterattack. In five minutes, the professional sound of clicking keyboards resumed.

Side note: I am too short to see over the walls, so I often pointed my Nerf gun over the cube first (mostly to shield my face as I then balanced on a sprawling office chair leg to add a few inches to my height) before I peeked over on tiptoe to add my shots to the volley. This became known as my “signature move.”

The corporate desks in that office may have looked the same dismal gray underneath, but they felt as colorful and unique as the people who sat there. In one coworker’s drawer were plastic ninja action figures, and he let me borrow them whenever I was stressed. (I set them up and shot them down with my Nerf darts.) He also kept boxes of Doritos and Cheese-Its in his overhead bins. Some ladies had every inch decorated with pictures of children, husbands, grandchildren, pets, drawings from children, inspirational calendar excerpts, and even a picture of Tom Brady. The men had pictures of their wives, sons, daughters, dogs. One had a paper with paint-covered handprints and “We love you, Daddy!” written on it. Some had Redskin mugs or Looney Toons thermoses. Dilbert comic strips. Printed memes. A demotivational calendar. A box of hidden candy to share. Many had piles of technical books. The post-it notes, papers, and notebooks were scattered among these indicators of a life outside of work.

These cubicles are anything but traps. The tall gray walls may seem like cages, but actually they mark a place of safety, a place that is yours, a place where you can sit after a tiring meeting and stare at the faces of meaningful people tacked up with thumbtacks, at whiteboard drawings of mountains and rivers. A place that is colorful and creative and personalized overtop of the gray. Each person finds a different way to make the cubicle welcoming, a place of both productive work and a little slice of home. A place that is a fingerprint.

Some people may argue that this is artificially decorating a cage. I think differently. My cubicle showed me the world outside, reminded me why I was working, reminded me that some of the colorful pictures were taken while I was employed at my corporate desk job, as if to say, “Look! Look at all this life! I was not caged in.” I do not live in that cubicle. But while I am there, that cubicle, that desk is both a place of retreat and a springboard, a statement that I am a person with a purpose and not a nameless cog that spins the corporate wheel.

That desk is no longer mine. For the next few months I will be spending several hours a week at a similar gray desk, this one crammed with approximately fifteen or sixteen other desks into an office space shared by roughly thirty-seven graduate assistants. Some desks have computers, but not all. A lined yellow post-it note with my name and hours is stuck on the front left corner of the desk, staking my meager claim. There are no cubicle walls, there are bookshelves full of student folders, and the office is littered with posters and articles and whiteboards left behind by nameless former graduate assistants. It is a different environment, a different sort of desk.

But it does not have to be a different me at that desk. I may not hang up pictures or neatly align Nerf darts at this desk. But it is a place I can joke with friends and commiserate on homework and swap teacher stories and advice. A place I can pause. A place I can eat my lunch and plug in my iPod to play instant refreshing and calm and hope for my soul against the sometimes swirling dark.

The desk for me is not a padded trap, nor is it a claustrophobic identity eraser. There I can laugh, there I can create, there I can eat, there I can breathe after meetings or conversations or documents, there I can listen to music that speaks Truth, there I can see reminders that grace is real, that God’s mercy is great, that His kingdom is greater than the darkness. There, that desk, is a place of peace and a piece of a kingdom.