Mountain Clams

Wet Blankets

Last year for Halloween, my coworker and I put together a pretty darn good display at our cubicles (pictured here). There was a wooden gate leading to our two cubicles, with a lattice arch over it. Behind that was a tree made from brown paper. Small lights were hung from the "branches" of the tree. The floor had a latex 4'x8' sheet of fake stone. We put camo netting over both sides of the cubicle with a low white fence. The cubicle itself was covered in green felt, decorated with leaves from outside, across the top, and black tablecloths around the bottom to give it a sort of tomb-like appearance. Headstones adorned the wall behind us. There were small slits in the top of each where we could pop up from our "graves" to wave and say hello. A skeleton hanging on the gate represented our manager (who sat in another area). Finished with spiders and pumpkins, it looked pretty darn good. There were people coming from all over the building to see it. We won the decorating contest, and our efforts were remembered this year when the contest was announced.

This year, however, we moved from our convenient location to a really inconvenient location. Instead of being the last two cubicles next to a wall, we have five of us arranged on either side of a walkway, right next to the CTO's office. This made it a lot more difficult to come up with something to do for decorating, but not impossible.

No, what made it impossible was a near total lack of participation from the members of the group. When the subject was brought up, one person's response was something like, "do what you want, I won't get in your way." Truth is, not participating is getting in the way. You can't do a full-scale department decoration without help from the people in that department! (I'm certainly not going to do all the work myself.)

Ah, well, there's always next year. Who knows where we will be sitting, or who will be sitting with us...

Labels: entertainment, work

posted by Brett @ 3:57 PM