March 3, 2004

I went to the IRS office with my mother yesterday to get our taxes done. While we were waiting, I noticed the cubicles in the office had big sliding doors. I thought that was weird. I don't spend much time around cubicles, but I always thought they were just three walls. I couldn't stop looking at them. I was studying them, I guess. There was just nothing else to do. Top notch waiting area, let me tell you. Not a magazine in sight.

Anyway, I kept looking them over. Estimated their height at about 6 feet, gray, hard plastic, nothing special. There was no mechanism on the handle, so I guess they just slid closed and you hoped they stayed that way. But then I noticed a keyhole on the door. What? A keyhole? Cubicles that locked?

I was pretty amused by this. I couldn't get over it. If the information inside the cubicles was so important that they needed to be locked up overnight, during lunch, whenever, why put them in a "room" with walls only roughly six feet tall? Is that really going to protect them if someone wants that information badly enough? Could you not just give the door a hard pull and break the cheap and probably plastic lock? Or, the walls looked pretty stable, so why not just grab a chair or step ladder and climb over?

The ridiculousness of the whole thing makes me doubt what I saw. Once we got inside one, for some reason, I kept looking it over. The area where the door would meet the wall when closed was just a long piece of black plastic with two holes in it. The holes were pretty small too. Well under a centimeter in circumference. More reason to trust that lock would hold no matter what.

I couldn't get my mind off the cubicles. The employee's poor fish swimming around in the bottom of a small vase acted as a distraction for a short time. I felt sorry for that thing. Small area made even smaller by all the roots poking downward. But I always went back to the cubicles.

Well, that's about it. Odd how that's the most memorable moment on a day that I had to visit my grandfather in the hospital after he had hernia surgery. You'd think I could've worked him in somewhere. Oh well. Maybe next time, grandpa.