At my current kingdom, the king decided everyone should have the same kind of cube setup. It's really quite Socialist when you think about it. (Have you ever noticed that there are no royal families in Communist or Socialist countries? It's no small wonder that I spend half of every day wondering if I am in the right place.)
Instead of having tall walls around each cube, we are all out in the open. With everyone out in the open, I had wished for a nice hum of background noise while I write thank-you notes for parties held the previous evenings. Unfortunately, the opposite occurred: the open office cube walls have everyone speaking in respectful, funereal whispers. That's bad news - there is certainly not enough enough background noise to cover the sound of nail filing, applying nail polish, counting my money, and perfecting my blow-out!
There is a very nice lady who offers me a selection of potential work each day. We'll call her 'my boss' because that just sounds so outrageously blue collar, wouldn't you agree? This whole work game is so fanny. Next thing, I'll need to keep my crown from tipping when I bend over to have my timecard stamped!
At home, it is very quiet because the servants do all of the noisy tasks while I am away. The quiet at home is driving me absolutely mad!
I'd love to ask the Hanukkah Fairy (yes, I am a Jewish-American Princess) to bring me some clever cube neighbors. But in my experience, you have to be super-specific about such requests. Sometimes you get someone who meets your requirements perfectly but has 99 other problems to boot. Such as my cube mate last year...
I'd been innocently craving chai (spicy Indian tea). Lacking a full-time butler to make it, I had looked up some chai recipes online until I found one that would help me. Each day the nice Indian girl who sat next to me would taste it and say, hmm, it needs more milk or less tea.
One day though, two hours after the chai taste testing, in a meeting with a senior project manager in a cube so small we could see into each other's pores, the nice Indian girl audibly and smellingly farted. She acknowledged the fart with a brief "Sorry!," then went back to work. After the meeting, she did it again. I tried to write it off by thinking perhaps my chai really was lethal, or perhaps I put too much milk in the chai and she was lactose intolerant. But that would not explain why she just did farted again that day. Twice.
This was just all too much for my delicate nose. So this is a great example of a nice cubemate can go off the rails: quiet (except for her bowels), makes some background noise (albeit with bowels), and I suppose if I fed her a cheese plate and a gallon of milk, we could have our very own Philharmonic going on in here. She was really a very sweet girl if not for the overactive bowels.
Her nose picking wasn't appreciated much, either. It's really too bad, because she was a total champ at it.
