Office Etiquette & Existential Dread
Written by Charlotte WardI was 27 when I learned that people think nail trimming is something you're supposed to do at home.
I had always figured I could get away with clipping my nails as an idle form of maintenance or as a thing one does when there is nothing left to do; in the car or on the couch or the bus or at work when you're 27 and in a corner cubicle which shares an exit with an ex-pat South Asian British man who,
on hearing these little snips and,
assuming I'm eating pistachios or
shucking sunflower seeds and perhaps wants one,
looms over and sees that I'm evening out the curve of the tip of my left ring finger.
"Oh god," he exclaimed in disgust, "do that in the bathroom!"
"What?" wheeled over my other cube neighbor to look at first through the perfunctory six-inch glass cube window, then standing up to loom over me, hand atop said window and abbreviated wall, "What's going on? Oh, eww. Yeah, do that at home!"
Maybe I wasn't 27. Perhaps I was 28 or 26; it all kind of blends together. I was working and living a run-of-the-mill Groundhog Day existence in a linear stretched cube farm that ran halfway from my manager's office to the upstairs kitchen, to the restrooms, and — at this point, in its short-lived existence as the Headquarters of Lynda — to the executive offices.
I recall my manager sitting me down at a performance review to tell me I'm in my quarter-life crisis. I've stagnated, and she's seen it with technicians like me while working in competitive environments in fields such as ours, doing whatever it was we were doing. She told me how I need to find passion in my job and so on, and all I could think was, "Oh fuck, I'm 26. If this is my quarter-life crisis, I'll live to 104."
"That can't be right," I thought, "I couldn't realistically live past age 55 or 65 with all my risk factors. Maybe this is my mid-life crisis.'
In my experience, cubicle walls can inspire existential crisis. I worked in four cubes at two offices in my near-decade at an internet start-up, and at least three desks in corners, hallways, or otherwise cut off from the world in such a fashion as video editors prefer.
This particular cube had walls low enough for me to check with the inside of my hip as I would angle in to sit at my desk, and, as a rule, I did such a thing at least twice daily.
Incidentally, that specific sensation and pain are only almost exactly replicated for me by riding the Ojai Trolley if I rise too fast at my stop. It is a frustratingly nostalgic sense memory that takes me back to high school.
My cube's useless windows served only for the gaze of any passersby as to what I had on my screen. I eventually covered the damn thing in scribbled post-it note comics or flyers for a band or show. Anyway, my screen was generally pretty well-managed to appear productive enough while also allowing me to keep a few chats and maybe Tumblr or Reddit open for a casual glance when actual work became bothersome, tiring, or otherwise onerous.
These were regular occurrences for me, the feral child that I'd never ceased to be. I couldn't be chained down to one task for too long without diverting my energy into something temporarily more interesting or — failing that — at least dynamic: it's how I went from waiting for glue to dry in Woodshop to assembling office for the rest of the semester. I couldn't tell you how many, maybe a dozen?
Only now, at the removal of twelve years and an entire gender, am I coming to the awareness that perhaps I do have ADHD, but that's a story for another time.
