Thread: Stories from the Cubes

I loved MJ's post on dead-end jobs, but the jobs that were dead-end in my life are the ones I remember most fondly! The jobs that really sucked for me were all in the cubicles.. Anyone else relate to this?

- My final year at UNR, I worked for the local public utility. For a lot of reasons, they were really hated in Reno. In fact, there were death threats, bomb threats, etc.. all the time. So, they put the interns in the cubes that were right next to the windows. We had fantastic views of the Sierra Nevada and were the targets in case anyone decided to start shooting. The higher up you were in the organization, the closer you were to the inside, until you reached the very top...and were locked away in a middle space with no windows.

- After graduation I went to work at a large CPA firm. At the time you needed to intern 2 years at a public accounting company in order to get your CPA certificate. Boy, did they know it! You were the lowest paid employee at the company and worked 80+ hours mandatory per week...with no overtime. There were probably 40 of us in the cubes in the area where I was. When the afternoon doldrums came, we played Final Jeopardy! Someone would come up with an obscure trivia question, a couple (or more) people would compete and then everyone would hum the Final Jeopardy theme song loudly. If we had a winner, we'd all throw the little dots you get from 2 hole punches at them! (Thereby creating a dead-end sh** job for someone else...in retrospect)

Anyone else have a story from the cubes?

me and the people around me I told were all laughing soo hard

I completely fail to see the humor here.

Just thought of another story (hard to believe I spent 3 years in the cubes...)

At the CPA firm we had this "secret code" for talking to the senior accountants. "Noted" meant eff you. Everybody knew it. The senior accountants had all done it when they were juniors like us. There were a few senior accountants who loved to make you look like a fool in front of a partner, so we'd just sweetly smile and say, "Noted." One real jerk would just turn bright red every time...and the partners tried not to laugh..because they all knew what it meant too.

Geez...can you believe how much time and energy got wasted on that passive aggressive behavior?

By the way, now you all know what I mean when I say, "Noted."

Never had a cube job, when I was in college & work study job in the library, my job was to inventory the periodicals & prepare them for scanning into microfish (boy am I old). I was the only one who took a staple remover & a razor knife so I could seperate the pages quickly. Everyone else would work for 3 hours on the box they were given, I worked for 1 hour & studied the rest of the time. I tried to tell them how to do it, and they would not spend th $2.00 for the tools. This was the last time I had a job working with people who don't want to see the way.
Another story: they were trying to hire a person to do data entry for the book keeping department. The minium requirement was a GED. A friend had an assoicates degree in book keeping & no job. She thought she would apply for this entry level job and it might lead to a real book keeping job. When she went into apply, the receptionist ask her if she had a GED, she said no, I have a high school diploma and an assoiciates degree. The receptionist said, you can't apply you have to have at least a GED. No amount of explaining would work, my friend left without the application.
Janet

This is the best! Thanks for cheering up my Monday.

Never did the cube thing either. ...However, one of the best dead-end jobs I ever had was working at der Weinerschitzel. I was 16 and it was the only place that would hire me with my grover blue hair (I thought I was cool). Anyhow, my boss was the ex-Navy guy in his 80s and had a weakness for punk rock kids- maybe he felt sorry for us, I don't know. Anyhow, there was this whole crew of freaks running the place, and late at night we would have this contest called "Who's the man". Being the "man" meant completing these insane dares that we'd all dream up. ...Eating various things that we'd deep fry, competing in Weinerschitzel olympics- which consisted of about 10 different games, one consisted of covering the bottoms of your shoes in lard from the frier and "skating" across the floor as fast as you could go, another sport was grill racing where we'd see who can make the most hamburgers in 3 minutes. Most every night I laughed so hard I cried. Best job any teenager could've had.