The Delegator sucked the canned, conditioned air into his lungs through his teeth, making a hissing-slurping sound. It was quite similar to the sound he might have made had he swallowed a slug whole. The harsh fluorescent lighting flickered on his skin. He had arranged for the lights in Cube Farm to be adjusted to a frequency that was only just perceptible to the human eye. Just flickering slowly enough for the cube-dwellers to become anxious, frustrated, and eye-strained – without being able to pinpoint the reason why. He put his anti-flicker glasses on with a slightly clumsy gesture that was meant to come across as cool and suave.
A few, previously loitering, Cube Farm dwellers scattered before him, scurrying back to their designated work places in the open-plan Cube Farm labyrinth. The Delegator gave a lopsided grin as he observed them scratching around, pretending to be working on extremely important tasks that, until moments before, had required them to stand around in the passage chatting.
The Delegator closed, and deliberately locked the Cube Farm Office Door. A unique door for a unique office. Unique things were clearly labelled in Cube Farm, and so the door had a beautifully embossed sign that read “THE CUBE FARM OFFICE DOOR.” Above the door, on the permanent walls of the office, was another similarly constructed sign that had a slightly shorter message: “THE CUBE FARM OFFICE.”
The Delegator ambled down the central passage way, looking left and right into the pokey cubicles, constructed of the highest quality compressed wood-chips. Cube Farm office workers (a misnomer really, since the only office in Cube Farm belonged to the Delegator) received only the best office furniture manufactured by the Cube Farm Corporation’s factories. The rest of the world paid top dollar for those misery-inducing surroundings, while the Cube Farm’s head office received dismay and disillusionment at cost-price.
One of the workers pried himself out of his cubicle, by seemingly dislocating his shoulder with a wince, and then clicking it back into place once he stood in the passage. He stumbled over and said, “Excuse me sir. May I take a moment of your time?”
Irritated by this interruption of his journey, the Delegator replied, “You already have. Don’t you have any work to do?”
“Uh. Yes sir, but that’s just the thing. I struggling to get anything done because I don’t have any desk space. I can hardly breathe when sitting down at the PC. Is it possible to make my cubicle slightly bigger?”
The Delegator stared at the young man for a while, not saying anything. Just looking. The young man smiled sheepishly. The Delegator stared. The young man cleared his throat. The Delegator stared. The young man pulled at his tight scratchy collar and tie. Sweaty beads formed on his forehead. At the point he seemed to be about to dislocate his shoulder in order to climb back into his cubicle, the Delegator started to talk.
“When you buy an Economy Class plane ticket, you get a seat on the plane. It’s not a big seat and there’s not a lot of leg-room. Sometimes you get the middle seat, and an obese woman who should have paid for two seats, sits on the aisle seat next to you. On the window seat, on your other side, is some skinny, pimply guy, with bad personal hygiene and a bladder infection, who needs to go to the toilet every 10 minutes. You sit in that seat for 8 hours or more and you suck it up and don’t complain. And you paid money for that.
“Here at Cube Farm, We! Pay! You! Get back to work!”
Continuing on his way down the passage, the Delegator thought back to when he had first established Cube Farm, and had considered calling it Rows-And-Rows-And-Rows-of-Desks, but couldn’t settle on the number of rows of desks. Rows-And-Rows-, or Rows-And-Rows-And-Rows-And-Rows-? It was a major dilemma at the time. In the end, Cube Farm was just the most obvious name. Cube Farm did, after all, make Cube Farms.
The Delegator didn’t walk very far along before reaching the Parking Bay. It also had a lovely sign to designate it’s uniqueness, although unlike the office sign, this one was on a pole embedded in the floor. In the Parking Bay was the Golf Cart. The Delegator got into the cart, happily fondled the steering wheel before turning the ignition and kicking the motor into life. Cube Farm was a big place – far too big to walk around. With the Cube Farm Office situated right in the centre of the place, the Delegator would have a lengthy 15 minute walk to get to the edges. Thus, the necessity of his personal Golf Cart.
He revved the engine gratuitously (custom made petrol-fueled golf-cart – none of that pansy electrical bunny-hugger crap) to annoy the adjacent dwellers, and zipped down one of the main passageways towards the cube where Manuel Drone laboured his agonised, claustrophobic, days away.
