Well, my days of non-flirting with Sara the Pizza Girl have ended. The lease we had in that building was not renewed, and I have been transferred to HQ. This sucks on multiple levels. I've been a programmer since 1995, and have always worked in a cubicle. Nothing fancy, just fabric-covered walls on three sides and a workstation, but it was "my" space. Twice I was lucky enough to be on an outside edge, so one of the three walls was low and I had a window.
The trend these days is to put office rats into a "shared workspace". Some genius figured out that at any given time, 40% (or whatever the number was) of employees are in meetings, or on vacation, or sick, or whatever, and not at their desks. Therefore, however many employees you have in your department, you only really need about 60% of that number of workstations. So they set up a big shared workspace where no one gets an assigned desk. Every day, you come in and find a place to set up. You hook up your laptop (everyone is issued one) to the black box, and you're on the network, and hooked up with an external keyboard and mouse and two monitors. To be fair, they seem to have tried to make things as nice as possible, considering that they're packing us in here. And of course, at the end of the day, you pack up everything and take it with you. There are signs reminding us to not leave anything behind.
So, gone are the days of having my own space. No pictures or little knicknacks on the desk, calendars on the wall, etc., unless I want to bring them with me every day and take them home every night. Fuck that. I don't even like carrying my laptop to and from. For 28 years, I was a cubicle rat. It wasn't luxurious, it sure as hell wasn't an office with a door, but it was mine, with my name on a little plate on the wall. No longer. And of course, the decision to do this was made by people who do have offices the size of my living room (and probably with nicer carpeting).
One plus that I've discovered: I have some pretty nice Sony earphones and play YouTube tunes all day to block out the noise, and help keep my sanity. The latest remastered version of pretty much anything I'd want to listen to, obscure live stuff, obscure studio stuff, stuff I've never heard of, stuff I've heard of but never had a chance to check out, it's all there. So there's a lot of stuff I've heard before but not the remastered version and never via earphones or headphones, and I'm hearing a lot of things I've never heard before. A guitar or keyboard lick I never knew was there. Background vocals low in the mix filling things up but not obvious. That kind of thing. Right now, I'm listening to The Yes Album, an album I've listened to easily over 100 times, and hearing parts I've never heard before. Before that was Animals by Pink Floyd; same thing. Hey, I have to spend eight hours a day in this pit (we're in the basement -- they literally refer to this area as The Dungeon), I might as well make the best of it.