A (tiny) room of one's own

Today is a banner day-- at work, they've given me an office all my own. Yes, it's tiny and windowless and someone's left behind a pile of empty binders, a lamp that doesn't work, and warped photographs of a dog dressed up for Halloween, but it's going to have my name on the door, the door that closes with just me inside.

Workspaces are important. I know because I've had mine rearranged, compacted, and flat out taken away at several of my previous jobs. Nothing underscores the existential stupidity of life like not having a workspace.

Let me illustrate:

My first job out of college was being a receptionist for the dean of the school from which I'd just graduated. Imagine a runner training for a race for four years, and getting down into the blocks all tensed up and ready to bolt, only to do a face plant when the starter's gun goes off. This, for me, was the agony of answering phones and collating stacks of old memos when I was convinced that if I'd only had the balls, I could be in New York, perfecting my affected smoking habit and tapping out brilliant essays on my laptop.

Instead, I slouched behind a giant cherrywood desk in a giant reception area, writing short stories with no endings and occasionally transferring phone calls to people who did real work. In front of me was an empty hall and behind me and on both sides were private offices, whose doors, when they were open, afforded the occupants a clear shot at me for gossip and complaints. But more often, I acted as the yarn between tin cans as my coworkers yelled back and forth to each other and then asked me to repeat the unclear parts. It was a unique feeling of being both totally exposed and completely invisible.

The office also had an antique wood floor that screamed and moaned underfoot, and I suspect the only reason that it was slated for replacement was that it made sneaking out early impossible. A big rhinoceros of a woman contractor came to draw up the replacement plan, and it was her task to figure out what to do with me while they ripped the boards out from under my workspace. She and the dean pondered their options above my head, like I was an expensive piece of machinery.

"Can we move out the desk and the computer?"

"Well... yes, but she's got to be able to get to that phone line and that's the only jack."

The solution: the computer is packed off to a storage room, the desk is carted out in pieces, the carpet is rolled up and hauled away, and I am left in a rolling chair in the middle of the room with the phone in my lap. For three weeks. For added fun, an ex-president was due to speak at the college, and mine was the sole contact number listed in the paper, so for three weeks I sat in my rolling chair and fielded 200 calls a day, repeating the same vague ticket information. The only reason I didn't quit was that several whackos started calling me pretty regularly.

(To the man playing Hall & Oates' "I've Been Waiting For a Girl Like You" loudly in the background while he moaned and yelled, insisting he'd fallen out of his wheelchair, thank you. Your slurred speculation about what I was wearing made the next 157 calls like an Easter egg hunt-- "which one has a nut inside?")

My next job was far more challenging and interesting, in no small part due to the fact that my office mate routinely divulged the sordid secrets of her free-wheeling New Age lifestyle. Trance-dancing, polyamory, duct tape pasties-- all terms that make for an interesting google search, but also an awkward lunch conversation that tends to be a little one-sided. The problem was that I actually had to work hard at this job, and the all too frequent bleats for attention shattered my concentration into crumbs.

When given the option of staying where I was, in a sprawling communal space with my own massive desk and a couch, or moving to a cubicle roughly the size of a bathroom stall in another office, I jumped at the chance to move. Even when it turned out that the ceiling in the new office periodically leaked sewage from the urinals directly overhead, I counted myself lucky.

[Besides, --and this is terrible-- most of the pee ended up on another woman's desk, a woman who decorated her entire workspace with plush toys that corresponded to the seasons. In fact, if I was really going to talk about horrific workspaces, I'd have to devote most of my thoughts to V., who often came in to find biohazard bags covering large brownish pools on her desk, and whose computer was continually being disinfected. In the true spirit of resilience, V. replaced each piss-soaked pumpkin and bunny with an exact replica, never truly losing faith that one day the problem would be fixed.]

My current job is actually quite fun-- I'm evenly divided between teaching (and meeting a lot of characters) and more solitary, introverted tasks, and up until now, I've been hunched in a back corner of my boss's office, working on another person's desk in the hours she's not scheduled. It's a bit like being a tick-- for hours on end I make my living deeply ensconced in someone else's personal space. I see little notes she's left herself, her chewed-on pencils, candy wrappers, a picture of her sister as the desktop image. I try not to leave any traces that I've been there, but still, it's weird.

Now, though... a room of my own where I can work in peace and listen to Tupac and scan the New York Times in my breaks... it's going to be great.