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Vote on this poll

Home
[bar] 75/10%
Office with a window
[bar] 69/10%
Private office
[bar] 45/6%
Shared office
[bar] 119/17%
Cubicle
[bar] 193/27%
Desk
[bar] 70/10%
Vehicle
[bar] 4/1%
Place to sit
[bar] 28/4%
Place to stand
[bar] 10/1%
None of the above
[bar] 15/2%
I'd like a job
[bar] 51/7%
Jobs are for poor people
[bar] 42/6%
721 total votes
Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by arden (Curate) on Aug 16, 2004 at 09:23 UTC
    Had to go for "None of the above" since I didn't see one along the lines of "body armor toting around an M249."

    - - arden.

      MyVehicle: forty two wheeler, GVW 160,000 pounds (US)
      I thought I saw Air Force stripes on those sleeves. When did they start issuing SAW's??? Do your thing man. Thanks.
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by Fiftyvolts (Novice) on Aug 16, 2004 at 14:11 UTC

    I voted cubicle, but quite frankly what I am in is far from a cube. Not only is it elongated, but also one of the walls is waist high, rather than shoulder high. This affords a paltry amount of privacy >_<.

    It seems that it is classifed as an "Office Assistant" style cube. It allows people easy access to hand paper to the person at the desk. Since I'm an engineer I decided putting up a "Don't Feed the Animal" sign was more appropriate. No one has asked it be removed yet ;-)

    ----
    The root prompt is set to # to remind users of its awesome power.
      You could put one up that says, "No, I'm not wearing pants today." And then every so often change it to "Yes, I''m wearing pants today." :)

      Useless trivia: In the 2004 Las Vegas phone book there are approximately 28 pages of ads for massage, but almost 200 for lawyers.
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by tbone1 (Monsignor) on Aug 16, 2004 at 12:34 UTC
    Lately at work, I mostly occupy The Dog House. Grrrr....

    --
    tbone1, YAPS (Yet Another Perl Schlub)
    And remember, if he succeeds, so what.
    - Chick McGee

Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by WhiteBird (Hermit) on Aug 17, 2004 at 00:59 UTC
    After some thought, I had to choose 'shared office'. I have three solid walls around my work space and it feels like an office, but I don't have a door--it's just wide open and I share that part of my space with the fax machine, the copier, the water cooler, a storage cabinet and the microwave. There's plenty of traffic minute by minute and lots of gossip-talk while people refresh themselves with food and drink.

    I'm also the first person that people see when they walk into our office area, so I tend to be the one that gets to sign for deliveries, answer stupid questions and direct traffic. I've learned to not make eye-contact with anyone, and I'm getting better at being able to immerse myself in my programming and ignore the hustle and bustle. Sometimes my director will ask me something like "Did Fred stop by to fix the fax machine?" and I can honestly answer "I have no idea. I didn't see him but that doesn't mean he wasn't here." I pay a price for that kind of concentration, though, because I'm often edgy and exhausted at the end of the day just from keeping my guard up.

    For security purposes, I do have cabinets and drawers that lock and the office does have a nice window that I can open. I'm on the fourth floor and there are no screens on the window. That leaves me a nice possible exit route if things ever seriously drive me over the edge and I want to end it all.

      I share that part of my space with the fax machine, the copier, the water cooler, a storage cabinet and the microwave [...] I'm often edgy and exhausted at the end of the day

      I find it helps to banter with visitors. When David comes by to copy some papers, call over "Dave! Makin' copies!" Switch things around to avoid boredom like "Davey wavey! Makin' copies! Copies for The Dave Man! Copytopia in Daveland! The Davemeister whips out the copies! Copyrama and a Dave-alama ding dong! Dave!"

      You'll also become more popular with your coworkers.

      - tye        

        I imagine that it makes some people avoid making copies. I know I'd wait until you weren't there. :-)
        Best...post...evar!!
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by fraktalisman (Hermit) on Aug 16, 2004 at 08:14 UTC
    It's a shared rooms and it's got windows. But now my colleague's on holiday it seems a bit empty.
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by castaway (Parson) on Aug 16, 2004 at 08:11 UTC
    Shared office.. in a group that was 8 strong when I started 4 years ago (in several offices), now only 2 and integrated into a larger team.

    As of tomorrow though, it'll be a new office, apparently more open-plan (which seems to be missing from the list above), hopefully it won't be too noisy, which is all I've seen of open-plan offices so far..

    C.

Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by santa (Acolyte) on Aug 16, 2004 at 11:27 UTC
    There's no option for Workbench! Ho.... Ho.... Ho!!!!
      ... or for workbench with adjacent computer workstation in a large 40 year old "temp" bldg.

      -Theo-
      (so many nodes and so little time ... )

Most of the above...
by htoug (Deacon) on Aug 16, 2004 at 08:47 UTC
    ..standing in a shared office with windows
    or
    ..standing at home (telecommuting).
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by ChuckularOne (Prior) on Aug 16, 2004 at 11:31 UTC
    For some reason here, we all have offices. Most of them (Like mine) are private.

    The way the powers that be talk about the space shortage, I'll be amazed if the walls aren't all torn out and "Cubeville" isn't set up by the end of next year.

    I've seen that happen too many times.
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by zakzebrowski (Curate) on Aug 16, 2004 at 10:42 UTC
    A shared desk, which was designed for one... sigh.


    ----
    Zak - the office
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by JimGarvin (Novice) on Aug 16, 2004 at 14:22 UTC
    I share an office with 2 windows, 5 linux, and 2 Mac OS X's. We only use the windows to do our timesheets.
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by japhy (Canon) on Aug 16, 2004 at 14:45 UTC
    All the developers here (at ICG, Inc.) have our own office space, apart from the main office. There are six of us, each with our own desks and personal space. We've got our own food utilities too (fridge, microwave, hot plates, toaster oven) and one of our developers owns a restaurant and usually makes lunch for us.
    _____________________________________________________
    Jeff japhy Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and perl hacker
    How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by bradcathey (Prior) on Aug 16, 2004 at 23:29 UTC
    vote on At my main job I mostly occupy my...

    ...time staring out my window in my office (appears on my time sheet as "conceptualizing")


    —Brad
    "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up." G. K. Chesterton
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by been42 (Curate) on Aug 16, 2004 at 13:17 UTC
    I have a window, but it's like an arrow slit so I only get sun for about 15 minutes a day. Also, I only have an office because layoffs freed up the space, so I really hope my vote doesn't have to change from "Office with a window" to "I'd like a job" before the poll changes.
      My office window has a nice view of the air conditioning unit -- oh, and a couple weeds that they can't quite reach to cut down.
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by kalle (Friar) on Aug 16, 2004 at 14:28 UTC
    Tsk. Jobs are for poor people...

    Well, actually, I'm a student; or slacker as my friends call it...
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by food (Novice) on Aug 16, 2004 at 21:02 UTC
    at home; and it's a good thing, because it's not always a pretty picture
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by gloryhack (Deacon) on Aug 16, 2004 at 22:01 UTC
    I consider myself to be extremely fortunate -- my morning commute is about 15 steps. It's further from my pillow to the bathroom than from my pillow to my desk. So, naturally, I check my email on the way to the bathroom. Who wouldn't?

    If the solution to a vexing problem comes to me in the middle of the (sleeping period which isn't always night) I can just get up, hack a few lines, test, and if things go well, return to bed for a very restful sleep. OTOH, sometimes those vexing problems are too engrossing, and I work myself into counterproduction. I strive for balance, but I don't always maintain it.

    It still beats working for wages!

      '... my morning commute is about 15 steps ...'

      yeah I'm in this situ. I'm saving up for my roald dahl inspired coding shed for those morning and afternoon sessions to code in piece and quiet.

        ... Dahl's process was obviously very isolated, very banal. Perhaps this sparsity was the real inspiration, forcing him towards his imagination and his memory. Dahl himself emphasised the importance of his hours in his shed ...

      There's a good article about his writing process. I can see the similiarity to coding.

      When I informed my young ones of this they started howling about cubby houses are for kids, not adults.

        :-) I actually started my business in an 8ft. x 12ft. mini-barn that I built as an office. It was a great little space, fully insulated/drywalled, windowless and quiet, and great for maintaining the isolation required for complete concentration.

        It was right next to my organic garden, and during the hatch the dragonflies used it as a sanctuary to avoid being eaten on their first night in the world. Every morning during the hatch I'd be greeted by a squadron of the little guys heading out to the garden as soon as the door was opened.

Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by poqui (Deacon) on Aug 16, 2004 at 15:28 UTC
    I have a relatively large cube. In my career I have had many smaller, but none larger. Its about 6 X 10.

    I had a "veal fattening pen" once, about 4 X 6, but there was a cabinet on one side at the entrance, and a work surface beyond that, so there was only about a 2' wide space in the middle. It wasn't *too* inconvenient for me, but I had a tall colleague who had to back all the way out of the cube to turn his chair around.

    The worst situation, for privacy, was the "study carel" desks at MCI. They had walls between, about 4' high, but the walls only extended to the end of the work surface, which was only avout 4' wide. Barely enough room for the monitor, the keyboard, and the phone. And underneath was a file drawer and the CPU, so there was no leg room either. Plus the desks were in a hallway, so it was fairly noisy too.

      I had one of those veal pens (at BCBSME, coincidentally). I referred to it as a "stall" though, which was made all the more funny when someone assembled for me a toilet paper holder and attached it to my wall.

      --
      "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right." -- Thomas Paine
      naChoZ

Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by Paulster2 (Priest) on Aug 16, 2004 at 20:02 UTC

    I didn't see an option for "Mind", because that is about the only space around here left to be occupied!

    Paulster2


    You're so sly, but so am I. - Quote from the movie Manhunter.
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by coreolyn (Parson) on Aug 16, 2004 at 14:51 UTC

    Since they decided to get rid of the smoke room I mostly occupy my car in the parking lot.

      I once worked for Blue Cross/ Blue Shield; and they had a no smoking policy on the entire grounds, which were large. Smokers had to go off property, which from my building was several hundred yards.
        Hehe.. I work for them now. I occupy a cube that's too far from my assigned ``work team'' for them to bug me (I'm an AIX Admin / programmer that does very little admin). Times must have changed, because our smoking area consists of a concrete picnic table, a semi-enclosed shelter, and lots of grass behind the building.
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by skiboy (Sexton) on Aug 21, 2004 at 19:06 UTC
    A shared office and computers ( between Day Ops and Night Ops) and no Windows except what is on the computers! In a locked room with 2 to 4 other people but at least I have a company supplied 27" color TV with cable and 3 HBO's for those lonely weekends I may have to work from time to time.
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by jbware (Chaplain) on Aug 16, 2004 at 18:13 UTC
    Voted "Shared Office", but only because there wasn't the "Shared Cubical" option. *sigh* ... Yes, packing us in like animals does make us more productive! </sarcasm>

    -jbWare
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by r11132a (Scribe) on Aug 16, 2004 at 18:22 UTC

    I have a private office, but it wasn't until recently that it stopped also serving as a make-shift storage area for certain test equipment.

    I finally threatened to plug in the equipment and try to install Quake on it.

Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by Crian (Curate) on Aug 27, 2004 at 09:28 UTC
    I vote for "office with a window", but I think it may be a "private" office with a window, if that means, that no one else is working in that office.

    The bad thing is, that the window goes to the south and is really big, so it is _very_ hot in summer (but summers are mostly short here in north germany ;-).

    What is a "cubicle"?
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by qedrakmar (Beadle) on Aug 23, 2004 at 13:33 UTC
    I'm surprised there was no option for "Laboratory"
      There should be an option for conference room, given the percentage of a work day one spends attending meetings where no one takes any decision :(
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by Nkuvu (Priest) on Aug 16, 2004 at 20:36 UTC
    Yep, I'd like a job. What I'd like most, though, is to be able to either work from home or just never work again and code for fun.

    But at my last place of employment I was in a pseudo cube. The walls were real walls but were the same height as normal cubicle walls. I actually preferred where I was to the non-executives who had offices. Because anyone who wasn't an exec generally had to share the office, thus winding up like sardines. My pseudo cube was larger than an average cube, but not big enough for two people.

Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by PERLscienceman (Curate) on Aug 16, 2004 at 22:58 UTC
    I select None of The Above for:
    "Cubicle With A Window"

    :)
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by johno (Initiate) on Aug 18, 2004 at 08:52 UTC
    The great outdoors.
    I'm stuck in an office today though.
    :(

    johno

Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by Anonymous Monk on Aug 17, 2004 at 16:12 UTC
    There was no choice for bathroom so I put private office.
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by TStanley (Canon) on Aug 16, 2004 at 16:52 UTC
    For me, its usually a 60/40 split between my office and my vehicle. At least they pay me for mileage :)

    TStanley
    --------
    The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing -- Edmund Burke
Shared office.
by jonadab (Parson) on Aug 18, 2004 at 13:36 UTC

    Shared office. We all share on big office area, except for the director and the treasurer, who have private offices, and the few poor souls who have to make do with deskspace in an area that's separated from the public only by a long waist-high desk on three sides. But most of us have space in the main shared office, which also functions as the lunch room (complete with microwave), server room (but not the network closet; the Cisco router is in the supply closet, right above the refrigerator), and the storage area for incoming materials, among other things.

    In addition to my desk's being in a shared office, it has now also become a shared desk two days a week, but I dursn't complain about that, because the volunteer I'm sharing it with is doing inventory, which was formerly one of the most tedious aspects of my job, and this now frees me up to do more interesting things.


    "In adjectives, with the addition of inflectional endings, a changeable long vowel (Qamets or Tsere) in an open, propretonic syllable will reduce to Vocal Shewa. This type of change occurs when the open, pretonic syllable of the masculine singular adjective becomes propretonic with the addition of inflectional endings."  — Pratico & Van Pelt, BBHG, p68
Re: At my main job I mostly occupy my...
by monkmoose (Initiate) on Aug 30, 2004 at 20:50 UTC
    Well, you know...cubes seem to be the most common...but I like to think of a cubicle as a creative box...one where the mind is to be stimulated by the surroundings to promote the production of the task at hand...such as converting bash scripts to PERL by listening to the Cranberries or having photos of home (I'm relocated from what used to be home) reminding me of the reason I trudge all day through numbers. I also like decorations that cause people to remain curious as to who you are...they all keep busy with the fear of getting to know who you really are...so you get to get the work done. But yeah...mostly the cube...I don't have a wireless nic, so the cube is my home away from my home which is also away from my home...hmmmm...

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