Cob Jockey

Awkward timing for this blog hop for me, since I just left my job and also my cube, and have no idea what my next one will look like.  I'm going from a steady 8-5 at one place to the life of a consultant.  But I did take pictures of my cubicle before I left it:

I spent so much time here, I argued for years for an IT hammock to be hung under the right side.  Every time of day, with power, without power, I have been here.  Home away from home.

I work in IT - or well, I guess 'worked' - now I'm more in high tech than in-the-trenches IT.  Both of my jobs since college have been in windowless basements.  I'm used to it, and so is this plant:



It's a cutting from "The Plant" at my first IT job at the college.  I was sure it would burst into flames upon seeing sunlight for the first time in its life last week.  (Spoiler alert:  still alive and un-flamed)

Anyway, my cubicle as shown above contained:

- Approximately 15 foam baseballs provided by a vendor (the one I'm going to work for, actually) used in a several years long game of office warfare (I love working with guys.  So much.).  The vendor even ordered more when we ran low, and their employees picked sides by choosing my swag bag or my boss's swag bag to drop them into at their booth at conferences. People would come downstairs and ask if they were all for stress relief, and I'd answer "...yes".

- A 5 Vietnamese dong note (approximately $0.0002 exchange rate) taped to the wall, because one of my users gave it to me while I fixed his phone, and I gleefully told all my coworkers I got paid in dong for closing a helpdesk ticket.

- 1 'gold star' drawn with a highlighter on a sticky note after I jokingly told my boss I was a special snowflake millennial in need of validation for completing some boring task.

- 2 24" monitors

- St. Louis Cardinals coffee mug, represent.

- 1 Lenovo X230T convertible tablet with a Core i7 and 16GB of RAM because I like overkill.

- My ThinApp desktop PC

- 3 pictures of Connor

- 1 picture of my husband and I (that ratio isn't so good, is it...)

- 1 Christmas card of my parents' and all of their pets from 2012 that I loved

- 1 EVGA zero client and 17" monitor for VDI testing purposes

And let's not forget the desk they had to lower at my request to make it even close to ergonomic for me.  They had the company come back and raise it to "adult size" yesterday.  Tear.

But that was then, and that cubicle is no longer mine.  Now I'm working on getting this tiny random room in the new house ready to be my office.  Before:

Every single surface was painted beige...even the ceilings and windows.

No idea what this room was intended to be.  Maybe a sleeping porch.  We believe there's a plastered-over fireplace behind the weird bumpout behind that purple cabinet.

After painting the trim, walls and ceiling: