Cube Farm

It surprises most new friends or acquaintances to learn that I served in the military for almost nine years. It’s perhaps even more surprising to find out I followed that up with another nearly decade-long career in Information Technology. And I get it. I’ll be the first to admit that neither of those things aligns at all with my personality or current occupation and lifestyle.

I started my IT career at the IBM campus near Boulder, Colorado. I was new to the industry but thanks to the nepotistic maneuvering of my girlfriend’s mother, I was placed in a position with a small team of software professionals that was lightyears beyond my knowledge level or expertise, which was nil.

I was mercifully released from that first contract after a matter of months and then found a help desk position on the same campus in a different department. Definitely more my speed, and I was happy to have it. So on the morning of my first day, I strolled into my new workplace with pleated khakis, a sack lunch, and a broad smile. A grin that was eradicated the moment the door closed behind me.

I immediately found myself looking out over an endless cube farm. I quite literally could not make out the end of the room and had never seen anything like it. I was curiously observing what amounted to people prairie-dogging in desperation. There wasn’t a moment in the roughly 60 seconds that I stood there assessing the commercial infinity, that there weren’t at least a handful of heads rising from or lowering into their corporate stables. Looking around as if they’d been abducted, awakened from a coma, or otherwise deposited in a time and place that they could not for the life of them tell you how they arrived.

It was like watching a game of whack-a-mole with human souls. Where the mallet wasn’t seen or felt physically, nor did it descend with any force. It didn’t need to. It simply hung in the air and with the lightest almost undetectable touch, extracted hope and optimism from those who dared to leave their keyboards and rise. It was the most well-lit darkness I’d ever witnessed.

After briefly scanning the sea of beige shapes and textures bathed by fluorescent bulbs, the moles would all eventually and reliably return below the barrier of visibility in a resigned way that was slow and almost mournful. I knew I didn’t belong there. I don’t know that anybody does. But it would take another nine years or so before I would muster the courage to do something about it. Thanks in large part to an early onset midlife crisis and the outdoors of the Pacific Northwest.