Slashdot Mirror
Piimpin' Out Your Corporate Office?
ignoringReality asks: "I just moved into a new office at work that is considerably smaller than my previous one. The furniture is crappy, the walls are plain, and there aren't any windows. I'm trying to think of a unique way to keep myself entertained but not distracted day in and day out. It's a corporate office, so there are obviously limits. Working in a box must be a pretty standard situation for a lot of Slashdot readers, so how do you guys personalize your offices?"
Nothing says status like space. The fact that you're in a smaller space is not a good sign.
That said, if we're talking an actual office with a door, the you're lucky. For now.
My suggestion is that you decorate your space with -- space. Keep it uncluttered, so that you appear to have more room. It also sends the subtle message that you're not making yourself too much at home, that you plan to move up or out.
I should make it clear I don't follow this advice myself. If you are a happy geek with no ambition to move up (like me), feel free to ignore this advice (as I do).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
A few people have commented on how spartan my office looks. The thing is, I don't look up often. I don't -care- what's on the walls around me. What I -do- care about is light. Our whole building is Too Damned Dark®, so I often end up with other light-junkies on my office because they "like how bright and happy" my bare-walled office is.
I've tried to convince people that ergonomics extends beyond "chairs that don't suck" and "goofy keyboards", but it's a hard sell, particularly when your managers include a lot of the "We had VT-52s and we liked it!" crowd.
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Go to a yard sale and buy an old window, then hang it up in your cube. Put a poster of a nice beach or some other scene inside of it. Instant beach side property!
Just my $.02
Come up with something cool nobody else has done before. Not even people "on the internet."
I once saw a room in college where the ceiling was covered with wrinkled aluminum foil and had red and blue lights pointed at it. It was a pretty nice effect. He did a really nice job too - right up to the corners and *lots* of crinkles. It was all probably about 2-3 inches thick. Neat look, relatively simple to do. (shiny side out!)
But you can't do that. It's taken. Just kidding. Do what you want.
Another guy in the same place had a very small room so he put his bed on a system where he could raise it up to the ceiling using some steel cable, pulleys, and counterweights to get it out of the way during the day.
Collect random junk and try to make something that looks like a person standing in the corner. Dress up a coatrack with random junk. Spare CAT5 for hair (or shredded paper), some spools of some kind for eyes - be sure to add some shades. Old t-shirt from the thrift shop. Think up some other stuff for the rest.
You could put color filters in your flourescent overhead lighting.
Build a LARGE binary clock for your wall.
You can always hang models or random crap from the ceiling.
Use tape or rearrange the tiles for some kind of boardgame layout on your floor. Pac-Man
Do what you can to "0wn" your friends cubicles in a non-destructive way. Racing stripes. Get some from an auto parts store and stick it to the side of your computer or monitor cases.
Have an artist friend do a mural. Mosaic-ify it and do it on the tiles, overhead, on the wall, in the bathroom.
Put up and "I'm from here." map. Even if it's just your city or tri-county area.
Maps. Just find maps from random places.
LEDs. Can't forget LEDs. (Just be sure to over drive them with an incorrectly designed power supply so they burn out and/or try to catch things on fire... HHOK) LEDs everywhere! (Everybody else is doing it.)
Get some lasers and front-surface mirrors. Get a laser to bounce back and forth across the office a few times then smoke something in the dark to make it appear
TUX. Can't forget TUX. He could use some wall space - right?
Beastie. Can't forget Beastie. Make a blanket!
Random sports equipment usually looks sorta cool hanging from the walls. Find a surfboard.
Replace some standard office equipment with the same piece, but made out of LEGOs.
Spare/Junk/Coastered CDs can be put on the walls in interesting patterns or made into clocks.
Make the coffee machine run off a generator connected to an exercise bike. Put people on rotation and make sure they get to work on time. Maybe riding the bike is enough exercise to replace the need for coffee?
Build a still. Like on *M*A*S*H* Imbibe on Fridays.
Build a file-cabinet maze.
Get some flourescent paint. Buy some blacklights.
Mess with the bathroom somehow. Make visitors wonder.
Paper airplane airport. Practice landings. Make a launcher with rubber bands.
Print out banner ads for your wall.
Tin-can-and-string telephone/intercom???
Get some fish.
Get yourself a "Jump to Conclusions" mat for the office.
You could probably etch a number of carpets or other surfaces with bleach or acid. Just mask and pour! (Carpet would probably need something heavy to push down into the pile to prevent run-out. Masking tape won't work unless you use a spray bottle. Mask -far- back.)
Take a Friday afternoon to go shopping for old couches and coffee tables. How about a gaudy lamp from 1964 for the corner of your office??
Have a "Cubicle Pimp-Out Contest". Flashy and Gaudy wins.
Remodel. Just moving stuff around will be fun and interesting for the next few weeks.
No windows in your office? Buy yourself a sledgehammer. It won't come with directions. You don't need directions.....
Find a good pic of your favorite landscape and Rasterbate it. (http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/)
Good things come to those who wait on the early bird who gets the worm... hey, wait a sec!
One of my former bosses thought it was a crime for me to play music. Complained when I used it without headphones (and was not loud by any means. this was an office, not a cube) and I got griped at when I used headphones because he got complaints that people thought I wasn't paying attention to them (They would open the door, see from behind that I was wearing headphones, playing at a very low volume actually, *assume* that I would not be able to hear them and then leave without saying a word)
It made me want to scream and the days dragged past.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
At the last dot.bomb I worked at there was some kind of arms race like thing going on with regards to "geeking out" your office.
The amount of time, effort and money these happy idiots invested in this endeavor was truly astounding.
The companies high lords of chaos (management) eventually shipped about 99% of the company offshore to Hyderabad and Bucharest (the 1% left in the US was, you guessed it, management).
The message being if you have the time to waste making your office "pretty" you might not have enough real work to do. At least from the point of view of the bottom line fixated management.
So these days I keep it spartan. Books (lots of java API manuals), maps on the wall (I do a lot of GIS related work). A couple of my large monitors display virtual fishtanks or random slide shows. And if you have tiled floors a good rug is a must.
I coat my office in posters from www.despair.com, which mock the corporate single-word-and-pretty-picture inspirational posters.
For instance, "Limitations - Until you spread your wings, you have no idea how far you can walk."
James
Cubicle? You're living the dream mate!
I get a desk with no partitons seperating my from everyone else in the office, although I can hide behind 5 (count em) monitors.
Of course friends in other departments envy me. They get to share a hotdesk with 5 other shifts. I have a calender on my desk, they have a tiny locker to keep their toolkit in
I started out at my last company in a cubicle, about a year or so later I had an office. Not a large one, but an office nonetheless. Things were going good, then about a year later I was moved to a smaller office. I was being paid well and the work was cool, so I didn't complain to much.
About a year after that, the office was reconstructed, while we worked, so people that had offices had to get cubes, and while some got their offices back - I didn't. I made a fuss, I tried to make deals - nothing, absolutely nothing worked. They said they didn't have room. My cubicle was a large one, but it had a weird "doorway", monitor faced out, and it was on a corner of an intersection where people naturally gravitated to hold impromptu meetings - meaning I could hear everything and had no privacy, period. Meanwhile, the office I used to have continued to be unoccupied.
For about a year this went on, and my old office continued to be unoccupied (along with about 2-3 others - but there wasn't room, remember?). I continued to have a cubicle, no privacy, and my one solace was that my supervisor allowed me to work from home over VPN three times a week, so it wasn't too bad for those two days I was in the office. My productivity never reduced, and my supervisor was pleased with my work.
Eventually, another individual moved and took my old office (me and him got along ok, so I didn't begrudge him having it), even though we supposedly "didn't have room". Whatever. Several months went by, my project was cancelled, and I was "let go"...
All in all, it was a fortunate thing to happen - I work for a business still in a "startup" phase, with fewer people than I have fingers to count them on. Furthermore, I sit in an "office" room which is quite large (24 x 16 feet), three walls of which have whiteboard space, plus a video projector and screen. I get to work on very interesting projects, and I make more money.
I don't know what my old employer was smoking, but they need to give it up.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
A great office plant is an orchid. They usually don't require much light which makse them great for windowless offices. They grow really slowly so they won't fill your office with green in a few years. Also when they finally send a flow spike up, everyone will be amazed.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
The last place I worked had everyone in wall-n-doors offices (which was generally a horridly antisocial environment, IMHO) and there were a few people who'd taken the "living room" approach, with warm incandescent lamps, etc. I found those rooms almost dreary, though; in my office I turned on every fluorescent light I was entitled to. The fact that these were windowless cells, and I crave daylight was part of the reason.
As for personalising one's office... the key word fragment there is personal. I've got Capt. Picard and Superboy action figures, a Macquarium SE (with my fish Point and Click), a miniposter of Michelangelo's David (i.e. it's art not porn), a print of a Frazetta painting of John Carter in a loincloth (i.e. it's pop art not porn), a calendar of Alex Ross watercolors, a sketchpad for taking breaks, an old "I'm not gay but my boyfriend is" tea mug, photos of my nieces and nephew.... because all that's me.
I saw one of the coolest cubicle's a couple of weeks ago out at a state agency. You could certainly adapt this to your office.
The guy had two large tree/plant thing on either side of the entrance, you had to push them aside to walk through it. He had then put pieces of wood spaced about 8 inches apart across the top of the cube, and on the desk below, had pots filled with some sort of creeping vines. The vines were attached to the wood. The entire cube was like a jungle. A lava lamp set the mood, and other small task lighting replaced the blocked light from the flourescents.
If I ever work in a cubicle environment again, I'm definitely doing this.
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...has an awesome line of tech friendly workspaces. Some of them have self-contained air circulation and they can rotate on a preprogrammed schedule to follow the sunlight, multi-monitor support, lighting, pneumatically adjustable seating with presets for multiple users, etc., etc., etc. http://www.poetictech.com/index.html
"Giving first aid the already disheveled hair projection" -Anakin