Sometimes you just have to ask yourself, “Why did I bother to get up this morning?”

Well, it’s happened again. The powes that be have reorganized us and I find myself on the move, leaving my pleasant little cubicle for another less pleasant smaller cubicle. In fact it’s like a Frankenstein cublice, cobbled together from bits and pieces of other cubicles. A Charlie Brown cubicle, if you will. My old cubicle had a window and although I had two cubemates, we were a pretty copasetic group. And one of them left after a few months, so it was really just two of us sharing the space.

I now find myself in another building which has no windows, in a back corner cubicle that currently has no phone and no Internet access. Got to love those powers that be. They plan these moves so smoothly. So I’m sitting at a public machine, sending email that will hopefully fix at least some of my problems and pondering once again the glory that is the corporate world (or rather, academia’s interpretation which I feel is quite different from the real thing). All of this leaves me to wonder what if I quit showing up? Would anyone really notice? If a tree falls in a cubicle does it make a sound? Is it time to retire yet?

I must confess that the old cubicle seemed pretty sucky at first, too. So maybe with time this new one will seem to feel like home. On the other hand, if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past couple of years, it’s that nothing stays the same for very long. My personal cubicle diaspora is not yet over.