An "Ask Auntie Lowan" Digression.

I have recently moved from an office to a cubicle (in technology we beileve that open space promotes co-operation) but it is one big cubicle and 3 people sit in it (I occupy two corners) - so it is not too bad...

I've never seen the movie, but isn't "flair" the junk servers in festive concept restaurants like TGI Fridays or Chili's decorate themselves with, like buttons, hats, suspenders, etc ?

oh my god, they didn't make it up for the movie...

"You know, the NAZIs had pieces of flair they made the Jews wear."

"What?!"

Keep working in that cubicle, Dlowan, and you'll end up looking like this...

vagicles...

The problem with cubicles is the straight lines. Nature abhors straight lines.

And why should It not? Nature, being Feminine, is signatory to no contract which might define, limit, or otherwise constrain in even the smallest of detail Its rich tempests of abhorrence. Today, a vacuum, the next day, purple hats, the day following, a staight line, and the day after that, the poet laureate of Canada.

Well, perhaps that last one is mine, and I've just smuggled it into the previous paragraph so that we can get right on to the coming paragraph, which constitutes, if you think about it, something of a typical guy affinity for the A to B straight line thing.
And I guess I ought to apologize right here for such a transparent device leading you, the reader, inexorably to vagicles.

He wasn't always the poet laureate of Canada, of course. Once, when the world was fresh and new and good, he was...well, not my mentor, exactly, more like a mutally pupil-dilated life traveller. And it wasn't as if it was really a relationship of equals. His Honda had less rust than my Lada, his wife was prettier than the centerfold from my most recent copy of 'Gigantic Asses', he was (inexplicably, it seemed to me) published, and he had my GPA by the short and curlies so when he told me to go listen to a lecture from a visiting feminist poet from Montreal, I thought there might be more gain in attending than not. Which gets us right to vagicles.

There were but two men in attendance, he and I, in a lecture room of some fifty. Prudently, I found a corner seat, my back to the wall, and with a clear view of all entrances and exits. The lights dimmed. Slow fade in to a bright slide of the poet's vagina. I found myself briefly wondering if she had been the 'Gigantic Asses' Miss October, but didn't inquire.

Fading out and fading in went and came forty five minutes of swirly, soft, and circular thingeys from Nature...sea shells, flower petals, hair sworls, fuzzy dandilion seeds, cumulous clouds, all attended by the soft sounds of babbling brooks and waves and seagulls (seagulls!?) and tumbles of nouns and adverbs in girlie fonts.

The subtle multi-media thesis gradually worked it's way into my Piltdown consciousness - if women were in charge, there wouldn't be any straight lines.

The problem with cubicles is the straight lines.

Be happy with cubicles, I live in quads <sigh>

yeah! d's space seems luxury to me, luxury, I tell you! Compared to my cardboard box, in the middle of Parramatta Road, dodging 6 lanes of traffic!

Blatham, have you seen Sweet Movie?

Your delightful story about the feminist poet reminded me of it.

As I recall, it starts with a beauty pageant. The Miss World Virginity Contest. Of course, Miss Canada is the winner. She is offered as a price wife to an oil magnate with a pretty useless goldmember. He peaks on her vagina.
What does the vagina of Miss Canada look like? It looks like the Niagara Falls on a beautiful day.

This is too much for me on the morning of a damned cubicle day...

"...ideo dilexit me rex et introduxit me in cubiculum suum..."

Pardon?

Check everything Deb, I think something is showing

I've often wondered why it is that as my career has progressed, my physical work environment has become less delightful.

My first job out of university I had an office, with a door that shut, a wooden desk, a barrister's bookcase, a window that opened, an oak coat rack, plants ... it was charming. I didn't get paid much for the amount of responsibility I had for people's lives, but the work space was grand.

Now I make 5 times as much money, work in a cube, can barely see a window in a building that has no windows that open. Horrid work space, but the job pays the mortgage.

you sure it doesn't look more like this?

Sort of an enclosure for keeping animals in?

Delightful tale, Blatham, delightful.

I'm not at all sure, however, that the problem is straight lines (which, in the larger, cosmos-oriented, scheme of things are an impossibility, anyway). Msolga, I think, has hit the 10-penny dab-snack on the noggin in suggesting that it is the 'enclosure' aspect of cubicles which threatens one. The claustrophobic personality will, perforce, be nauseated by the prospect.

But, since your post implies that persons of the feminine persuasion are more apt to resist such (seemingly) straight-line enclosures than males, let me suggest this. Perhaps the straight lines have nothing to do with it. Men, however, are always trying to crawl back into the womb, so a cubicle might well serve as a substitute pro tem.

Thank you. I'd always wondered. Does it come with the hovering rainbow?

Yup.

I glad and relieved to know you have work and income. Sigh (of relief).

Merry

Let me say right off that I've tried a number of the substitutes and have found them all wanting.

Secondly, as a man of small town Canadian Mennonite upbringing, I am measurably more humble than the next person and so, receive contests to any thesis I might advance with grace, good humor, and an eager ear. Until the arguer turns his back.