Cubes and Chaos

Cube life during the holidays is a bizarre time. The corporate machine pretends that it is going to surge into the new year with all cannons blazing, setting records, making sales, crushing competition and always putting the golden calf on the alter of the almighty dollar. The reality is the last two weeks of the year watch that great machine grind to a virtual halt. More than 60% of the workforce is on vacation for some length of time and as a result nothing really gets done. The parking lot is empty, the cafeteria is empty, the normal lunch hotspots are barren accept for the few high school and college students still on winter break. It really is not a bad time to work if you have the motivation to do so. There is no one around to harass, bother or otherwise distract you. However, the motivation to work at more than 30% efficiency when the rest of your fellow cube dwellers are on vacation is nonexistent.

What I find fascinating are those people who really do feel the obligation to push harder during this time. They seem driven to make a point, to prove something to anyone who cares to watch that they are true workers and they will get shit done come hell or high water! If you even mention to them that they take it a bit easier, or *Gasp!* leave an hour or two early, and they just about lose their minds. I can almost see the 1’s and 0’s behind their mental processing slow down and repeat a simple message DOES NOT COMPUTE…ERROR…ERROR. These people are not aberrations. I would actually say they are in the majority. They won’t leave early, they won’t taper off their workload to any appreciable degree, and they won’t indulge in a slightly longer lunch or a slightly later start to the day. They just keep charging forward, bayonet in hand, bringing conquest to the cube trenches. I might find it inspirational if I was not so diametrically opposed to this way of thinking. I honestly can’t help it anymore than they can. I think I am one of those people who saunters through life with both middle fingers raised in defiance of the established order. I have no problem leaving early, taking longer lunches, and sleeping in a bit, especially during the holidays. I am not offended or threatened by the hardcore workers who obsess about every minute they spend at work, but I have given up trying to communicate with them. I can’t understand their need to abide by the unwritten codex of day-to-day “rules,” and they can’t understand my need to flow around walls, through cracks and into the nebulous “grey area” where rules are mere guidelines, not law.

This might make me sound like a bit of an anarchist, which is not the case. I respect law and order and understand that it is the glue that holds families, businesses and governments together. However, I am always going to be a small point of chaos in that sea of structure. It is not something I would change in myself even if I had the will or the power to do so. I like going against the grain. I enjoy not walking the path I am supposed to. Once upon a time I was on track to the “ideal” life of the gingerbread house with the white picket fence. The sun would rise and set like clockwork and I was to be a champion for structured and ordered life. Then the train jumped the tracks, and once you set down the path of chaos there is really no turning back. You see everything with different eyes. You crave the unorthodox and the extreme. You respect order, but you rail against it. You never do what you are ‘supposed’ to do, and even when it seems you are behaving and following the path, you are actually bending enough regulations to take your so-called “proper action” to the edge of normal. To those that plan and count and measure, I respect your ideology and the path you walk. But do not fear disorder. Do not shy away from that little bit of chaos in your day-to-day world. Do not feel discomfort when an ambassador of discord, like me, challenges the status quo and unravels a bit of the yarn that is the “normal life.” Sometimes we have to destroy in order to create, to upset the established order to advance, to open our ears and listen to what the universe is telling us…if Mother Nature tends towards disorder and chaos; if she drinks at the fountain of entropy; then who are we to argue?