Introduction
Chapter 1: Combating Office Awkwardness

Chapter 2: The Fundamentals of Office Real Estate
To the untrained eye, every cubicle in a corporate office is identical. Three walls the color of dirty gym socks, mostly unused drawers stuffed with shit from the last twelve inhabitants, migraine-inducing florescent lights, the nicest desk chair and computer monitor you’ve managed to scavenge vulture-like from other recently abandoned cubicles; each is custom designed in the spirit of The Giver to dim memories of color, natural daylight, creativity, joy and other such luxuries that may cause you to wonder about the world outside of the community between the hours of 9 and 5. You may hang up pictures of your baby and/or puppy, important looking documents marked with highlighter, comic strips about sad cartoon characters who also work in a cubicle, or, if you’re an Active employee, the bibs from every 5K you’ve ever “competed” in, but most would agree that even these sad suggestions of personality are not enough to distinguish one cube from the other three that share its dingy walls. Cubicles, with their drab sameness, in their tidy little rows, appear to be the great equalizer, the Levittown of the work world.

Don’t be fooled! There are subtle differences between these cells, and it’s very possible that your workspace is putting you on a lower rung of mediocrity than your peers! I currently share a small office with its very own window, so I am clearly well qualified to educate corporate novices about the politics of office real estate.

Reality Check: Location Based Office Relationships
I have been back at my office job for less than a year and I am presently inhabiting my fourth workspace. I would estimate that over these three moves, I have actually traveled a total of one hundred feet. However, in an environment where you routinely instant message, call or email people who could hear you if you spoke their name aloud using your “inside voice”, small distances seem very significant indeed. An office takes the vastness of the world wide interweb and crams it between you and a coworker an arm’s length away, so the sense of physical space is very skewed. Each trivial seat change is purposeful, meant to move you moderately closer to someone with a position somewhat related to yours so you can avoid any bodily activity more strenuous than typing or chewing.

Now I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but because of this warped perception of distance, the majority of your work friendships are based on proximity alone. Unless you have interacted with a coworker outside of the office at a non-company event, your value in the relationship is determined largely by your immediate availability for a hushed complaint session when the manager is being a bitch.

For this reason, entire office friendships can end when a desk is moved less than twenty feet away. If your closest daytime confidant is relocated, especially in a direction you don’t often travel, your interactions can change from intimate daily updates about your Match.com failures and frequent bladder infections to the occasional hallway wave. When you happen upon a former office neighbor in the bathroom a few months after a move it’s almost awkward, like running into an ex for the first time post breakup. “Oh…hey. Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve IMed. I keep meaning to send you this funny video but, well, you know, I’m next to Susan now. And I can actually hear her cracking up when I email her my hilarious, custom-made Demotivational Posters, so she’s really satisfying all my needs. See you at the Christmas party, and take care”.

If an office buddy moves to a different floor it’s like your best friend in the third grade moving to a school across town. Technically they are quite accessible but for all the effort it would take to maintain the relationship, they might as well be in Singapore.

My suggestion? In an environment where convenience rules and an arbitrary seat shuffle could happen at any moment, it’s best to treat an office relationship like a rebound. Know that it’s more than a one night stand, but don’t become emotionally invested. Don’t expect them to “get you” like your last neighbor; if you make an exceptionally witty comment when someone obnoxiously replies-all to a companywide email and they only respond with polite laughter, just remind yourself that they’re only going to be around until the next one. It’s still better than not having anyone to make witty comments to at all.

A Brief Introduction to the Market: The Workspace Hierarchy
Becoming emotionally invested in office friendships is a messy affair, so it’s best to focus on the location and condition of your workspace itself, as this is the best way to determine your place in the company. Below is a brief overview of some common office seats, what they mean about your level of success, and how you can make the best of what is likely a terrible situation.

A. Offices: 4 Walls > 3 Walls
1) The Unshared Corner Office With Window – Yes, this stereotypical symbol of career success isn’t reserved for bad romantic comedies where yet another heroine finds herself loveless because of her demanding position at the ad agency. If your place of business currently employs more than ten people and you inhabit one of these offices, you have already read more of this chapter than is necessary. However, feel free to continue to read at your leisure during work hours as you are probably a big deal and relatively difficult to fire.

2) The Unshared Central Office – You are possibly important, but your phone conversations may also just be so obnoxious that you have been exiled to a converted storage closet. If there is a circuit breaker on one of your walls, that is a very bad sign. If people frequently visit you for reasons other than to ask you to shut your door because your Pandora playlist is fucking unbearable, your location indicates that you are probably pretty close to success. Keep slogging away at your middle management position and you may just add witnessing sunlight from behind glass to your list of Q3 goals!

3) The Shared Office – The fact that you have a fourth wall and the ability to slam a door in someone’s face makes you superior to your colleagues in cubicles. Still, let’s not get too big for our britches; if you have to ask questions such as, “Do you mind if I eat tuna in here?” while sitting at your own desk, you are probably not making any decisions pertinent to the success of the company. You can gauge how close you are to taking it to the next level by getting your officemate fired and seeing if they bother moving someone else into the vacant spot.

B. Cubicles: Is yours slightly less shitty?

1) The On the Way to the Bathroom Cube – This is by far the most bittersweet seat in an office. A lot of coffee is consumed at work, and having a cube off a main thoroughfare on the way to the can gives coworkers the opportunity to pay you frequent visits without expending any extra effort. Don’t fooled by your celebrity. You are not the most popular or interesting person in the office; you are simply a convenient relationship to maintain. You may find yourself engaging in several conversations a day with urgent coworkers who have approximately thirty seconds for a pop-in chat before they piss their pants, but should you move to a more obscure location, your stock will plummet. The visits will abruptly cease, and soon you will be as irrelevant as Britney post K-Fed.

My suggestion? Take advantage of the popularity while it lasts. See how many office rumors you can start via the drop a deuce railroad. See if you can cause any accidents with your conversation skills alone. Carry on with your visitors loudly so your less popular coworkers buried in the cubes behind you become envious of your fame. Like any A-list celebrity, know that total obscurity is only a move from feature films to a TBS sitcom away. The all-staff meetings, with the dim looks of recognition and quick nods from your coworkers are like your VH1 celeb reality TV show appearances. Hopefully someone important will become confused by your buzz and promote you before your fifteen minutes are up.

2) The Under Construction Cube – I used to sit in an area where a loud, horrible, buzzer-like noise (imagine the sound that signals the end of a basketball game or the “the most annoying sound in the world” that Lloyd makes in Dumb and Dumber) would go off inexplicably for at least a minute and a half every afternoon. The maintenance guys couldn’t determine the cause of the noise, but when they went looking for it, their search took them for several weeks to a ceiling panel directly above the entrance of my cubicle. I preferred their drilling, frequent ladder ascents and grumbles of puzzlement to the buzzing, but if you are having to make a similar compromise, know that you are not very high in the cubicle hierarchy.

My suggestion? If you’re the sucker in the cube next to the broken air conditioner, the leaky pipes, the mysterious pounding, the unidentifiable odor, go for the workers’ comp! Unless you get the nastiest bout of carpal tunnel ever, it’s very unlikely that you’ll ever get another opportunity to reap the full benefits of this marvelous program. So dive under falling wrenches, find a tool box to trip over, grasp at unprotected wires with wet hands and then laugh all the way to the bank and back to bed. Not working at all trumps even the fanciest of office seats.

3) The Monitor Toward The Walkway Cube – A key component to cubicle decorating is the positioning of one’s computer monitor for maximum privacy so as to prevent upper management and common snoopers from being privy to your social networking and shoe shopping during business hours. Unfortunately, there are some fundamental cube arrangements that make it utterly impossible to situate your monitor so it’s not directly facing the walkway behind you like a highway billboard. These cubes generally have stacks of drawers bolted beneath the desk, with the only hole for your legs directly across from the cube opening; no matter how creative you get, unless you work with your feet in a bottom drawer and your keyboard in your lap, your extracurricular internet interests are widely known to the general public. Despite your greatest efforts to minimize, everyone that takes that route to the kitchen knows you are really keen on youtube videos featuring creepily adult-like babies rollerblading and discussing finances through the wonders of CG.

My suggestion? People are going to see what you’re looking at anyway, so keep it real. Everyone in an office is at some point in the day engaged in one or many of the following activities: Facebooking, Youtube-ing, G-chatting, job searching, Someecarding, cursing their Mint.com weekly financial summary, managing their fantasy football team, or perusing humorous non-work related websites and sending the links to several of their friends (okay these are pretty specific to me, but there are countless other options). If there is someone in your office who is actually engaging in company related activities every minute of their work week, they are probably painfully uninteresting and you don’t care what they think anyway. Don’t sheepishly minimize your interests as if you’re ashamed of them! Don’t pretend you’re having a coughing fit to stifle your laughter! Take out your headphones and watch those silly cat videos at full volume! If your manager comes by for a visit, ask them which free Craigslist dresser they think is more likely to survive the drive back to your home. If they have a problem with your frankness, tell them the amount of effort it takes to hide these activities takes away from your overall efficiency when you actually decide to start working. Try to incorporate the words “drill down”, “bandwidth” and “prioritize” in your explanation, and demonstrate your value to the company via color coded spreadsheet. You will be promoted immediately.

4. The Micro Climate Cube – Have you have ever walked into a meeting in a winter coat and beanie and noticed that your coworkers are in short sleeves? Are you the only one being scolded by your manager for wearing spaghetti strap tanks meant to prevent profuse sweating and dehydration-related death? You might be sitting in a micro climate cube.

My suggestion? Your company is not going to overhaul the central air system for your benefit, so do like the Iowans do and irrationally embrace your unpleasant weather! The best way to combat a shitty seat situation is to not acknowledge that you’re in a shitty seat. The differences between cubicles are so subtle, the lines between terrible and not so terrible are so grayed, that creating envy is enough to make your desk better than the next guy’s. Sitting in a particularly balmy area? Sno-Cones! Is your office unnecessarily frigid? Ladies, lose the bra and see how many days you can go without having to buy your own Starbucks to warm yourself up! When life gives you a lemon, act like it’s the greatest lemon ever and your coworkers are inferior for not having a lemon too. Or, cut the lemon open and rub it in your eyes in an attempt to get workers’ comp.

Chapter Summary
1) Not all workspaces are created equal. Your useless coworker could have a slightly sweeter seat than you!
2) Don’t become attached to work neighbors. You love them, but you’re not IN love with them.
3) You have an office! This is as good as it gets! Congratulations?
4) It is very likely the people in the positions above you have no idea what you actually do. Being very popular, creating unwarranted seat envy and intriguing management with the blatant advertisement of your duty shirking are all excellent ways to get your boss to promote you in a fit of confusion.
5) There’s no shame in collecting workers’ comp. It’s the ultimate promotion.