Re-engineering Cubicles

Engineers are a creative bunch. Their creativity goes beyond designing hardware and writing software into re-designing and re-engineering their environment. If there's something they don't like about their cubicles, all they need to do is bring in their Makita drills and they start getting creative.

We had a brand new office build-out in a network storage company. The engineers assigned to one area of that floor decided that they wanted to a different layout for their cubes. So, instead of contacting facilities for a re-layout, they had a "cubicle reconfiguration party" one weekend and tore down and rebuilt all their cubes into a big "bullpen area" with a wide open space in the middle for them to hold their office chair races and their pizza parties. The chairs they all linked into a huge ball and hung them from the ceiling.

Monday came and my facilities coordinator walked around the facility. Lo and behold! There's this huge ball of office chairs hanging from the ceiling and the cubes have been completely redesigned. The engineers acted like nothing has happened and kept about their business. My coordinator just kinda shook his head and reported what he saw. It was no use putting things back the way they were because we all know that they would just do the same thing over again. This was one battle we let them win and we learned to pick the ones we could fight rather quickly.

The Office Chronicles

Welcome! I've always said that I could write a book with all the strange, annoying and oftentimes very entertaining things that I've seen in the 10 years of working in Facilities Management. I started out as a Relocation Manager for a disk drive manufacturing company where I learned that it would take guts of steel to stand our ground against whiny IT people, clueless movers and demanding middle managers who think they're the next CEO of the company. From there I worked as a Space Planner for a contract furniture dealership where I learned that salespeople would often promise heaven and earth to a client and then dump all the work on us poor designers to meet ungodly expectations. I decided that I valued sleep and a social life than long hours and psychotic salespeople so I left and moved into Facilities Planning for a hi-tech company. Here I learned that you need to be a politician, a psychiatrist, an arbitrator, an artist, a designer and a project manager all rolled into one little package. This is where I've validated the saying that patience is a virtue for I had encountered practically every unthinkable issue that you could think of in managing a site. Currently, I'm a Senior Facilities Planner for a major oil company working as an ex-pat in Manila.

This blog is a tribute to all the insane, oftentimes frustrating but funny, stories I've heard and situations I've experienced first hand. You would probably see a lot of Dilbert-isms in these but, you know, Dilbert is pretty much what Scott Adams' view is of his former workplace. Enjoy!