When I first started writing this blog and came up with the title "Escape from Cubicle Nation," my Dad told me the story of one of his first run-ins with cubicles in the late 1980’s. He was working as a photographer for a large utility company. One of his assignments was to take pictures of cubicles that would be used in a brochure to explain the benefits of these beige walls to employees. As he looked at the cubicles, he said, "I just HATED them. My brain hurt just to be around them." He turned to his friend Charlie who was writing the brochure and said:
"I promise you that in 10 to 20 years, psychologists and psychotherapists will be publishing research papers about the detrimental effects of people working in cubicles."
His friend Charlie thought he was overreacting, or being funny. "No, really, I am serious," my Dad said.
And now he is proven right, by the article cited in Kathy Sierra’s Brain death by dull cubicle.