Know your place

Most people in this department has cubicles. All tech writers, and a lot of economists and RDMs, and at least some people whose positions I don't know. A few RDMs have offices of their own with doors and everything, as does the supervisor of tech writers and probably most subject matter experts.

We have name signs (you know, those things with someone's name on them, I'll edit this post if I can find a more specific name for them) on our cubicle walls, and they are as crappy as you can get and still be recognizable as such. They are the McDonald's Happy Meal toys of office accessories. Looking around the office right now I see four different fonts, six are made out of paper instead of anything more sturdy, and at least two names are held up by tape, so standardization and a sense of professionalism for tech writers are obviously not high priorities.

But this is on my mind because of yet another problem with them that just happened a few minutes ago when someone came into the office to talk to another writer. There are patches of adhesive on the back of the metal frames. If you were putting them up on a wall that would work fine. It would be a little less permanent than a real careerist would want, but it would be visually indistinguishable from something screwed directly into the wall, so who cares, right? The problem is, we don't have walls, we have cubicles. That adhesive does not stick to the loose-weave fabric of a cubicle well at all. So at least four of us use a row of thumbtacks under the frame to hold them up. Obviously, they fall down all the time, like happened five minutes ago to someone else.

It's a good thing that I realize this job is a position of no authority and don't particularly care about that, because if the shoddy facilities couldn't be a more calculated insult if it was intentional. And yes, of course I realize that any desk job is a great job by world-historical standards and my problems are trivial, but still, it's really obvious that we're just supposed to be temporary, which is kind of depressing. Even in industries which happen to have high turnover, wouldn't it be good for morale or something crazy like that to have the illusion of permanence and buy-in?