For reasons I don’t fully understand, a lot of people don’t seem to like working in cubicles. Cubicles are considered dehumanizing and isolating hells–usually by “experts” who work in private offices. If Robert Frost were writing “Mending Wall” nowadays his narrator would be mocking his cubicle neighbor by questioning what was being kept out and what was being kept in. “But here there are no cows.”

If I were the neighbor I’d tell him to shut the hell up and get his butt back in his own cubicle. “I don’t need any stinking cows. Good cubicle walls make good neighbors.”

As an introvert, I like having a small bit of dehumanizing isolating hell to call my own. I’ve seen Japanese offices with hundreds of people. Their desks are shoved together in neat rows, kind of like boxes stacked in a warehouse, and each desk is piled with random notebooks and binders and projects and each faces another desk. No one looks happy because everyone looks haggard while they wait for the boss to go home so they can go home. There’s no privacy and no way to personalize anything. It’s basically an urban sprawl of row houses inside a large room.

I bring this up because after 14 years in the same desk, I’ve suddenly been moved to a new desk. The new desk is smaller than the old desk and instead of shelves above the desk, I have shelves on my desk eating up some of my space. The desk is mashed together with eleven others to form a kind of island of full time part time teachers (long story). Everyone around me is great and a lot of fun, but everyone’s a bit too close now and I find myself wishing I was either on a corner or had some kind of partition. Good cubicle walls make good neighbors, or at least makes me a more pleasant one to be around, which is something that doesn’t happen very often. (The new chairs, I should add, are awesome.)

I’ve already begun looking around for quiet spaces to work outside of the office, but there aren’t that many around. Everything is designed to handle lots of people, not provide quiet spaces for them. The Japanese love their groups and I love them too; in another part of the building.