Your Tax Dollars at Work

I work for a consulting company that won the bid for a Department of Defense web project. Fortunately, this week we began moving our people into the building in Rosslyn where the DoD folks on the project sit. It's pretty nice - the office space was just completely renovated, and the building is as close to a "downtown" as you can get around here; I definitely prefer it to the suburbs.

The woman whose cubicle is adjacent to mine is probably in her mid-forties. Her 11-year-old son is 5'3" tall, weighs 140, and plays two sports after school. They live in an 800-sf apartment near King Street and like to shop at Whole Foods. She picks her son up from his after-school activities in the evenings, while another mother drives the boys there. She's gained 10 pounds since she started this job. I found all of this out in less than two days of work (or, rather, what I call 'work').

And how do I know this much about the woman on the other side of my cubicle "wall?" Because Queen Gab Fest spends half her day on the phone, that's how.

And she is LOUD. I brought ear plugs in today and ended up putting them in and pulling them out of my ears all day long while Ms. Gabbie made her loud personal calls. To make matters worse, she's a fan of speaker phone. That was too much, I thought to myself while beating my head against my desk. But the kicker was when she turned on some video on her computer, with no qualms about airing the sound through her PC speakers. At that point, I finally spoke up, "What is that?"

"Oh, it's my computer. Sorry." Unfazed, the audio continued.

Anyone who has ever worked in a cubicle environment knows these unwritten rules: No loud voices, no music, no computer audio without headphones, and no speaker phone. Period. No, no, no, no, no!

The funny thing is, all of us consultants sit together in one area. The DoD folks sit on the other side of the floor. I'm surrounded by empty cubicles right now. Any occupied cubicle near me has one of my teammates sitting in it. Most of my teammates are still in the old office across town.

And yet, in this vast sea of empty cubicles, who ends up sitting just inches from me, with nothing more than two one-half-inch thick corkboards separating us? The loudest, most talkative, oblivious woman on the floor. Why isn't she sitting with her own folks? Hmmm.

So there you have it. Your tax dollars at work at the DoD. I can't imagine taking a job and then sitting on the phone half the day. It's either a Southern thing or a government thing because I saw it the last time I left NY and moved to this area. You figure, if she's spending a good four hours a day on the phone, she must be one of those people who surfs the Web and responds to personal email at work too. When does she work?

Maybe she doesn't have to. Maybe her boyfriend works at AiG . . . . but let's not go there. Not today.