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?"
I use OpenOffice.
For myself, when I had a converted closet for an office, the most important thing for me was good lighting. I kept it darker than most people liked it, but it was warm and gentle lighting.
I've seen a lot of people hang what look like drapes from thier walls, to give some solour and texture to the room.
Don't forget the music, and toys.
Pretty Pictures!
the Dilbert Ultimate Cubicle
Complete with lighting that simulates the sun moving across the sky as the day goes along.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
(Especially the cube goodies section. My co-workers love the Acrobots
END OF LINE
Whoa horse!
That's only for emergencies!
Pretty Pictures!
Some people have a hard time doing work if their environment sucks. Thus the fixation on ergonomics. Think of cube decorations as "mental ergonomics" if you want.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
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.
--
What are you talking about? We're just a bunch of soulless drones anyway. I'm going to decorate my office with the barcode my manufacturer gave me as I was being assembled in the plant.
Did you miss the part where he said "not distracted".
Here is a game you can play. Find and empty white room, with a single empty desk and an uncomfortable chair. Take your laptop, and try to get some work done there.
Your brain will look for anything to ramp up the level of stimulus. And that doesn't mean your work. It means stuff like feeling compelled to spend three hours customizing the font and colors on your laptop screen. Or checking your email every thirty seconds.
Is it a crime to, say, play music while you work? This guy is just looking for the equivalent. Happy employees are better employees.
Oh - wait a sec. Do you work for EA?
Picard turns out the borg queen to make some money for new "Quad"litium crystals
"He's a real midnight golfer"
I have one word for you:
Strippers.
Neck_of_the_Woods
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Thanks for the added trailing slash.
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I've got pictures of my family pinned to my cube walls (on the one wall that allows things to be pinned to it :-/). On the file cabinet behind me I have 6 framed pictures, but rarely do I turn around to look at them.
I have juggling balls, which I pretty much never touch.
One statue of Buddha. Green.
Framed picture of the Red Sox beating the Yankees.
I have an iPod which I listen to on the commute in, and carry up to the desk, but it usually sits there and I dont put my headphones on. Probably because I tend to listen to podcasts rather than music, and find those distracting when trying to work.
And so on. It gives me stuff to look at when I take my eyes off the monitor, but it's not really there for entertainment. Nor is it distracting. It's decoration. I don't think that's what you were asking for, though. You want toys.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
The less stuff you have, the less crap you have to carry to the next job.
I think I speak for all cubicle-dwellers when I say:
Do you have a door? We'd kill for just a door. And some walls! Glorious, glorious walls...
<huddles in a corner, shivering>
Doug
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
"there aren't any windows"
Must be linus' office!
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
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.....
I'll create my own corporate office, with blackjack and hookers! In fact... forget the corporate office.
Whenever we get a new employee and they bring in all their toys and music and fret about getting their space set up just how they like I think, "I am going to hate that person because their productivity is going to suck." 9 times out of 10, I am correct.
Real live plants are nice. Even without a window some plants will be fine under flourescent lighting. Look for "shade" plants.
If possible you may also want to smuggle in a "super-daylight" flourescent light. You want something that is about 5500k with a CRI higher then 80. A single 2ft or 3ft tube, or 20w to 30w compact would be fine.
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
Thinkgeek.com has a lot of stuff to make your office your own. I personally have the binary clock work tends to freak people out, but I think it's cool.
/. community on what types of cool stuff they are growing at work. Based upon their suggestions, I started a few jalapeno plants which already have 2 leaves a piece.
I actually posed this question to the
Live web cams
As Moe would put it, I've got "lotsa crazy crap on the walls":
Two framed 27" x 40" movie posters from the first two Terminator movies.
Between them on a plexi shelf mounted on the wall stands a 14" endoskeleton figure.
A framed share of Apple stock from Oneshare.com.
A few items of memorabilia from the local AHL team's championship season a few years back, including a photo of me holding the Calder Cup (being a season ticketholder has its privileges).
The motherboard from my very first computer, a Tandy 1000 circa 1985.
A (now framed) oversized New Jersey driver's license that I used to use to make fake IDs when I was young and foolish.
A framed marquee from a Q*bert coin-op machine.
Finally, a plush Q*bert doll I bought on eBay, with a homemade foamcore flying disc screwed to his feet dangles from the ceiling via nearly invisible fishing line.
At both my last job and my current job, it was generally agreed that I had the coolest office.
I like to put anormous stacks of paperwork all over my desk. Also, I pid very detail, hard to read data diagrams on the walls. Looks mean as hell.
Of course, a nice collection of pens of many colors can provide enjoyment. Don't use the neon ligut under your overhang cabinets. Bring a small lamp.
Finally remember this: Don't have anything at your cube you can't live without.
"Piter, too, is dead."
For the standard small office cube - unplug the ghastly flourescent fixture and put in a floor lamp with incandescent bulb and a cheap oriental rug. Instant class.
If you can't do that and you like your neighbor, pull an Office Space. Tear out the intervening wall and share a double cube. This makes your area look roomier even though you still have the same space.
If anybody asks, tell them Derek told you it was OK. Unless your company actually has someone named Derek, in which case use Sheldon.
Not responsible for the reactions of Maintenance or Supervisory staff when they find out about these changes.
Or you could do the f'ing work your office is intended for and stretch your creative muscles on your own time, at home.
I'm not sure if this is intended for me specifically, or the general reader. I am responsible about getting my work done - and I use my creative muscle at home and at work. Feel free to do whatever you'd like at your work - sounds pretty exciting from here. Unless you work odd hours or have your own business, I'd say you aren't much different from many readers here looking at the times you've been posting over the past few months.
Isn't superiority wonderful??
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I'll give you 8 out of 10 on your attempt at condesention. It sounded pretty good at making people feel bad. Making *me* feel like crap - Sorry that I can't give you better than a 3. Do try again. It's appreciated by us all.... I'm sure especially by your boss.
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
Although I've never worked in a cube or office, I do have a home office which ideally functions similarly to a work office, that is to be asthetically pleasing while not being distracting. Here are a few ideas for decorating that I've come up with.
First of all, if possible go with static decorations, as neat as those little moving doohickies and thingamuhwatzitz may seem, they tend to be distracting, often catching the corner of your eye. Along these lines, think color scheme, if you tend to just pick things willy nilly then you can end up with major clashage.
I prefer a deep somewhat victorian color scheme, deep reds and browns, golds, things of that nature. If your stuck in an office then a more modern look might be appropriate, white and black with chrome.
Light level is also important, Most people have an optimal light level that they like to work in, I prefer a low light environment, too much light makes me sick and gives me headaches. A lot of people have the opposite problem, be sure to know what sort of light level works best for you and go with that.
Carpet is also important, along with adding a bit of style to the room, a good carpet can cut down on noise, especially if you have a lot of people walking through your area.
When working with limited space, it's also important to think multifunctional, for example shelves can break up the monotony of a wall space, as well as providing much needed horizontle surfaces.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
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