The Cubicle Next Door (17 page)

Posted on October 28 in
The Cubicle Next Door | Permalink

Comments

Experiment. Experience is all there is to life.

Posted by:
philosophie | October 28 at 10:03 PM

Yeah, ’cause once you finally get it all figured out, that’s when you die.

Posted by:
survivor | October 29 at 11:28 AM

Don’t you just hate those “not required but highly encouraged” events?

Posted by:
justluvmyjob | October 30 at 08:02 AM

Unexpected behavior reveals a disconnect between who you perceive yourself to be and who you really are. Hypothesis states you will resolve this conflict only by engaging in behaviors to eliminate the contradiction between the two perceptions.

Posted by:
NozAll | October 30 at 12:13 PM

Otherwise known as Festinger’s Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Thank you, Mr. Fortune Cookie, for your scintillating analysis.

Posted by:
thatsmrtoyou | October 30 at 12:26 PM

Seventeen

T
he next week I was watching ABC’s news journal with Grandmother. They kept teasing viewers, just before cutting away to commercials, with an upcoming story on blogs. Reading tantalizing bits of blog entries. Talking up how they were cyber diaries just waiting for electronic eyes to read them.

I was marginally interested.

Mostly for security’s sake.

Since I did, in fact, have a blog. And I didn’t want anyone to know who I was.

So I suffered through an exposé on biomedical research. And another on customer service hotlines. Finally, the blog segment came up. It was the last story.

Of course.

The story started by flashing the logos of the most popular blogging sites. Had fade-outs of different blog titles. And then a voice-over started reading from a blog.

I’m worse than a shark. I can smell your cologne from 100 yards away. And it lingers in my senses, long after you are gone
.

I swallowed my water down the wrong pipe and started to cough. Couldn’t stop. But I could still hear the voice. It kept right on reading.

John Smith doesn’t know this, but I’ve got his back. He thinks I work just as long as he does, but I don’t. Not really. I just stay until he goes home. In spite of considering himself the expert at everything, he doesn’t know anything about the women here. Has no idea how many of them have paused at the cubicle and then kept on walking when they’ve seen me sitting at my desk
.

They were reading from my blog!

Grandmother snorted. “This is public television. They shouldn’t be talking about things like that. What kind of person writes this sort of thing?”

I did.

I wrote that sort of thing. But I never though anyone would read it.

The voice went on say people blogged for many different reasons. That my blog, The Cubicle Next Door, was, at first glance, just a blog about modern life, but if read carefully, provided perhaps some shades of office romance. Of the modern girl next door. A diary filled with the angst of unrequited love.

Angst!

They actually called me the Ingenue of the Blogosphere.

I sat through the rest of the segment praying that at the end they would put someone else’s URL up on the screen. Hoping that somewhere out in cyberspace I had a clone.

As it turns out, I did not.

On the way to work the next morning, I felt exposed. As if everyone in the world knew I was ABC’s favorite ingenue. If only they could see me now: dark green sweater, lime green Converse. Hair pulled back with two rubber bands that had last been used to hold stalks of celery together. I had ceased to be anyone’s ingenue at the age of three.

All the way down the interstate I lectured myself about the blog.

I had only ever started it for therapeutic reasons. To vent. To whine. To rage. And those reasons still held true. Especially after last night. I’d never asked for publicity. Didn’t want it. In fact, it could hardly make a difference.

In anything.

The only person I really didn’t want to know about the blog was Joe. And what were the chances he’d even watched TV the night before?

Football?

Maybe.

A news journal?

Never.

So I was safe.

Joe was already in his cubicle when I got there. Sipping coffee and leaning over his laptop.

“I could order you a cover for your keyboard. That way when you spill coffee on it, you can just wipe it off. No harm. No electrocution.”

“Hey.” He barely looked over at me.

“Don’t let me disturb you.”

“Hmm?”

I shrugged out of my coat, draped it over a stack of boxes. Logged on to the computer.

“Hey.”

“You already said that.”

“There was this blog on TV last night.”

I broke out into a cold sweat right above my lip. “Really.”

“Here. I’ll send you the URL.”

I opened the e-mail from him and read my very own address on the Internet. “I never read blogs. Waste of time.”

“Never?”

“Ever.”

“Because it seems like this one would interest you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It just reminds me of you.”

“What’s it about?”

“Some girl. I’m reading backward to the beginning.”

I brought up the blog and went into my archives. Brought up my very first entry, a little over a year ago. Scanned for anything at all that might give me away. Nothing.

Went to the next one.

“Huh.”

“What?” What had he found?

“Nothing.”

I worked my way through the first month, horrified by the number of things I’d blogged about. Why couldn’t I keep my big mouth zipped? Or my hands hidden inside mittens. Something. Anything.

“Wow.”

“What?” I kept bringing up entries. Skimming them for hints, clues, anything that would give me away. Heaping humiliation upon myself.

“Wow.”

“What? What!”

“She must really like this guy.”

“Who? Which guy?”

“The one she’s blogging about.”

“The blog’s about a guy? I thought it was about a cubicle. The Cubicle Next Door.”

“It’s about the guy in the cubicle next to her.”

“Oh. But maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s…symbolism.”

“Symbolism?”

“Yeah, you know. Like…water equals life and winter equals death.”

“Then what would this equal? ‘
My little car doesn’t stand a chance in a face-off against an SUV. It’s the equivalent of modern day jousting. Or boxing without separating the athletes into weight classes. And that’s what John Smith drives. Too bad. I might have been able to like him
.’”

“Oh. That’s easy. SUVs are symbolic of man’s inhumanity against man.”

“For example…?”

“For example…it’s always the little guy who gets crunched up. Her little car versus the guy’s big car. Big box stores versus Mom and Pop stores.”

“Oh. SUV as metaphor. The car as a literary vehicle. Tied in with jousting to lend a historical perspective to the plight of modern man. The image of the boxer, pummeling his opponent.”

“Yeah. All that…stuff.”

“Then you two have a lot in common.”

“We do? We don’t. I don’t think we do.”

“You both hate SUVs.”

“Have I ever said that?”

“Frequently.”

“I didn’t mean
hate
. That’s a rather strong word, don’t you think?”

“Well, I don’t think there’s any way you could mistake this one: ‘
I’m worse than a shark. I can smell your cologne from 100 yards away. And it lingers in my senses, long after you are gone
.’”

I put my hands over my ears. Placed my forehead on the desk. Stop it. Stop!

You know how awful your voice sounds when you hear it on video? Being quoted to yourself is five times worse. What was I doing writing love letters on the Internet? It was almost like poetry. And I suck at poetry. I always have.

This is my personal hell: having Joe read my blog to me verbatim, from start to finish. Over and over and over again. “Maybe we shouldn’t be reading it.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe she didn’t think anyone would see it.”

“It’s on the Internet in the public domain. Why would you blog if you didn’t want people to read it?”

I didn’t know. I really didn’t.

Joe fell silent for about 15 minutes.

I sorted through my e-mails. Updated my Outlook calendar with various meetings. Cleaned out my Sent Items e-mail box. “Are you still reading?”

“Yes.”

It took him about two more minutes. Then I heard his chair push away from the desk. “It’s an M Day—I’m late!”

“See you later.” I said it to his back as he went flying down the hall. I sighed. Slumped in my chair. Everything was okay.

I was still safe.

Later in the evening, after all the trick-or-treaters had gone to bed, I went into the blog. Went to the reports area where it listed how many people had visited.

My heart skipped a beat.

I blinked. Squinted at the figure. Blinked again. But there was no way to turn 20,000 into 2000. Or even 200. In the last 24 hours, I’d had 20,000 people visit my blog.

My life had been placed into a fishbowl. I had become an exotic species of Internet fauna. Twenty thousand people, whom I didn’t know, now knew both the first and the last things about me. They were reading all my secrets. And recently, every single entry of the blog had to do with Joe.

What was I supposed to do?

I closed out the reports and returned to the blog site. Scrolled through the comments from my last entry. I looked for comments from my regulars first. It made me feel better to know there were still people out there who had been with me from the beginning. There were about 20 times more comments than normal. Some made me laugh. Others made me blush. Several I deleted.

What was I supposed to do?

The blog had always been available for anyone to see. Nothing about that had changed. Joe had read it, but he still didn’t know it was me…blogging about him. Nothing about that had changed, either. There were thousands of people peering into my soul, but no one had the ability to assign that soul to me. So everything was okay. I didn’t have to do anything differently. I only had to keep on doing what I was doing.

All I had to do was keep pouring out my thoughts and my feelings—my heart—onto the Internet.

That’s all.

THE CUBICLE NEXT DOOR BLOG

Setting the blog straight

Okay.

The first thing I want to say is that this blog is not about John Smith. It’s about life in a cubicle. The Cubicle Next Door. Get it?

It was originally established to vent my feelings about the life of a worker hidden away behind a tiny desk in a large bureaucracy.

And that’s it.

If you personally feel some emotional connection to my thoughts or feelings, all I can say is it’s entirely coincidental. If you misconstrue these posts to be from some virtual girl next door, then that’s your mistake.

I just wanted to make sure we’re all on the same page here.

Posted on October 31 in
The Cubicle Next Door | Permalink

COMMENTS

You go, girl!

Posted by:
grrlpower | November 1 at 01:13 AM

On the same page? Oh yes, we certainly are. ;) (Meet me in the supply closet tomorrow at 3:15.)

Posted by:
iknowubabe | November 2 at 06:05 AM

Relax. We’re with you. You’ve perfectly captured the essence of the modern human condition.

Posted by:
philosophie | November 2 at 08:34 AM

Of course it’s all about the job.

Posted by:
justluvmyjob | November 2 at 09:31 AM

Methinks you protest too much.

Posted by:
theshrink | November 2 at 08:45 PM

Eighteen

A
bout the whole Internet blog thing? I just made one tiny miscalculation. I hadn’t realized Joe would become a regular reader.

Or that he would read the entries aloud to me every morning.

I just made sure I drank my coffee after he was done. Because if I had actually been awake enough to hear him, I might have had to slit my wrists.

Why didn’t I just stop blogging?

I couldn’t.

No one knew about Joe except for me. And the 30,000 people who read my blog. The numbers increased daily. There was no one I could talk to about him. Not in real life, anyway. So the blog served some sort of purpose. I could imagine it was like talking to a friend.

Or a mother.

It made things a little trickier. I had to try not to quote myself. Online or off.

But people started connecting. I lost track of how many comments I received thanking me for giving a reader the courage to just tell Mary or Sue or Tina about their secret crush.

I
couldn’t
stop blogging.

I was offering a benefit to humanity. I was running a do-it-yourself dating service.

I was stuck.

One morning Joe returned from his M day lectures at lunchtime. He threw his bag into the far corner of the cubicle. I heard it hit the wall.

He walked around the wall dividing us and leaned against it.

I swiveled my chair to face him. “What’s wrong?”

“Everything. I don’t know if I can do this.”

“Do what?”

He threw his hands out. “All of it. Everything. The whole cubicle desk job routine.”

“You miss flying?”

“Yeah. I don’t quite know what to do…aside from repainting my house, room by room.” He rubbed his hands across his eyes. “It’s not just about the flying. It was the chase and the hunt and the mission. It was the reason behind the flying I enjoyed. I guess I hadn’t realized how much of me…how much of my life…was about being a pilot.”