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.