Chapter 4: Signs, Signs, Everywhere Signs

"Signs, signs, everywhere there's signs,
F***in' up the scenery, breakin' my mind
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign?"

And the sign says you have to have a membership card to get inside.

From time to time in the workplace, especially when you live in "cubicle city", you feel the need to decorate your space with something to jazz it up a little bit. For some people, this involves putting up pictures of their wife and/or kids, and even their pets. For others, they like to put up pennants, banners, or bumper stickers and fashion a little shrine celebrating their favorite sports team. On occasion, some will even turn their keyboard over and pound on it several times in order to clear all of the crumbs and granola pieces out of it, just to keep up with appearances.

But what if your visitors are disrespectful of your work space? What if they maliciously, and without regard for life or property, decide to leave important paperwork on your chair? Or what if they do something even more vile, like lean against your desk while they're talking to you? What if you're mad as hell and not going to take it anymore?

You label the ever-loving crap out of your cubicle.

If you're touched in the head.

To my amazement, as I was wandering into Spam Boy's un-inhabited cubicle one day, I noticed a number of additions to the landscape. Yup, he had finally snapped. The first thing that caught my eye was that all along the desktop, there were several labels that read "Not a chair". I guess this was to discourage the leaning. Or it was an open invite to getting himself beaten up at work.

Then, as my eyes wandered, I noticed that on the two chairs that resided in his cube were labels that read "Not an Inbox". Apparently, picking papers up off of your chair and putting them on your desk is way too much work. This of course went nicely with the label on the desktop that pointed to the actual Inbox and was labelled, you guessed it, "Inbox". Now he's really asking for it.

Lastly, as far as the interior of the cube went, there was a label for the phone. I'm not even going to comment on this one.

Moving outside to the exterior of the cube, there were a number of newly-added funny postings, but I'm only going to touch on the highlights. First of all, there was an email from the Computer Science department of the University of Massachusetts, the school that he was getting his Master's Degree from, asking him if he could please not tie up all of their servers over there. Turns out he was logging in remotely from home, running some huge memory-hog of a program over there on multiple servers over a long period of time while collecting metrics from it. It seems that they had received a number of complaints about it, and they were none too happy. The email went as follows:

"We have noticed (and have also had some complaints) that you are using alot of cpu resources over 6 or 7 machines at a time running programs like sim-outorder. These programs are bogging down the computers at times when other students need to do work as well. Could you please try to keep your usage down to one or 2 computers, or run the programs after 11pm?"

What was not pleasant was a printout that he had posted on his outside wall right below the other email which was a private message from another student telling him to please get off of his server because he is using too much of the resources there. It said:

"DUDE
get off my computer
you're using up all my cpu
i need it
use 34, noone's using it
EOF [sic]"

This was followed by another printout documenting the process in question that he was running. According to the printout, it had been running for 6,791 minutes (a little less than 5 straight days), taking up 99.4% of the CPU processing capability, and 25.5% of the memory. Ouch!

Here's where things started to get really crazy. Somehow, somebody found a way to get into his overhead cabinet and steal his Kudos granola bars. He thought he knew who it was too... he had erroneously assumed that it was my friend Ryan who sat on the other side of him. Thinking that he'd taunt him, he took an empty Angelina's Sub shop bag (one of those long thin ones), filled it up with crumpled up pieces of paper, wrote a note on it for Ryan that he could feel free to eat it, and then taped it to the outside of his cube. We were now officially entering Crazy Town.

The one that finally got him in trouble with the office was when he put an empty pizza box resting on the top of one of his cubicle walls. Now we were entering "Safety violation" territory. Now I don't know where everybody else works, but amazingly enough for a place that primarily deals in developing software, we have some very strict safety guidelines that we must follow. I'm talking ridiculous guidelines. They give us a test at least once a year so that we know how to deal with printer toner, the silent killer. Then there's a whole other course that teaches us how not to electrocute ourselves. Basically, they treat us as if we are working in the Gaza Strip at the start of Ramadan.

So needless to say, an empty pizza box falling on one's head could cause... well, nothing really. But he had to take it down. And the Angelina's sub bag too. Well, in reality, it was taken down for him while he was off at a meeting. The safety monitor came in and unloaded a can of whoop-ass on the whole cubicle. A few small things remained...

On a less noxious note, he had a printout from a software compilation that he was working on that said "Class 'Spam Boy' is undefined and has no friends" which was obviously ginned up on purpose, but did certainly drive the point home. ('Spam Boy' was not what was originally there, but I'm still trying to change names to protect the innocent and all that noise).

Lastly, there was a printout from the Earthlink website advertising their anti-virus and spam-filtering capabilities. At the top of the printout, he had written, "This cube protected by the following:". So apparently Spam Boy's cube needed some spam-filtering.

And the removal of about 10,000 signs.