Within the walls of the cube farm, even the simplest of events can cause a stir. Like the time when someone brought in samosas. The entire sixth floor rejoiced and ate of the samosas. Then there was the time when they handed out free promotional CDs. CDs with interesting product information for everyone! And more recently, when they closed the bathrooms on this floor, curiosity led to rumour, rumour led to bigger rumour, and bigger rumour led to people walking into walls due to overstimulation.
The bathrooms were closed for not a couple of days, but two weeks. Two weeks! This was no small repair, but a major renovation. We could only imagine what wonderful changes awaited our bladders when the bathrooms finally reopened. Gold-trimmed fixtures? Wood panelling? Comfey sofas? A nice fireplace and decorative sculptures of scantily clad individuals caught in mid-frolic?
Finally, the day came that they reopened the bathrooms to the general cube farm populace. Breathing the heady fumes of drying paint, we entered.
Well, it was a bit of a letdown. They’d replaced the faucets and slapped a new coat of paint on the stalls and taken a very long time to do it. On the bright side, the intrigue brightened our small lives, and for two weeks we had regular exercise hiking up one floor. It wasn’t, in retrospect, a complete waste of time — the cubicle drones were able, for a short time, to pee in the very same fixtures as the executives. And that’s worth something, isn’t it?