Viva Carlos Blog Hop: My Cubicle

I’m fourteen days late to this party because I really hemmed and hawed about joining the hop.  For various reasons I didn’t really want people knowing exactly where I worked, but then I realised that I kinda shucked all anonymity already on this blog.  So I’m just going to do it… in a kindof cheater way.

I work 2.5 jobs at the moment, as long as you count my thesis as a job.  When I’m teaching, I guess I would up that to 3.5.  It’s funny, because until I wrote this down I never thought of myself as the type of person holding multiple jobs to make ends meet but… I guess I am.  For my most important job (thesis), I do a lot of work from the safety and comfort of my couch.  From there, my view tends to look a lot like this.

We’re either reading food blogs or looking at a Viva Carlos post. Not even sure.

As you can imagine, my office mates are rather useless for data analysis.  They are extremely useful at convincing me it is time to go to the barn.

When I can escape their siren-like lure and heat into my office on campus, I live in one of those sea-of-cubes type setups.  It’s actually not even fully walled cubes either.  A quadrat of graduate students get four desks that face inwards, with half-walls separating us from the next quadrat.

My desk is decorated prolifically with pictures from Africa and books about primates.  I use an ancient second monitor that is set up poorly, and thus I have to move my mouse off the right hand side of my screen for it to fly in on the left of the other monitor.  I make it work.  I keep food at my desk because I like to flaunt the rules of food safety, and I hate walking back and forth to the refrigerator.  And because I’m a coffee snob I bring my own in every day instead of drinking whatever is available at work, or buying any (because horses).

There are slippers and more books stored under my desk (it gets cold in our office), and I keep a blanket on my chair.  The notecard held up by the red push pin on my bulletin board is a layout of dressage court letters.  One of my best friends and desk predecessor left me the poster that’s above my desk.  I helped collect her data and don’t have any posters of my own, so it seems fitting to leave it there.

I put up a super judgmental picture of one of my favourite chimps behind my computer so that I would be reminded to work hard and go back to see her.  I’m disappointed to say the tactic didn’t work, but I enjoy having my Janie stare down at me whenever I open or close my laptop.

Jane is watching you.  (She was actually way cuter than this picture demonstrates.  Unfortunately, she also hated having her picture taken so whenever I would try to she would shield her face or throw dirt at my camera.  This was about as good as I ever got.)

I should tell you guys some stories about Jane some time.  She was the best, man.

Now, none of these office views are particularly inspiring.  So to distract you all, here’s my all time favourite office view.  From when I lived in Congo.  Best office ever.