Life in a Fishbowl

Warning: Extra-long rant/complaint ahead. Feel free to stop reading now if you're not in the mood for that.

Now, remember my post about how we were going to be moving at work? Well, it happened. I now work in a fishbowl. I knew it would be bad, but I also knew I had no choice, so I decided to try and make the best of it. My space is right by the window that looks out on a hallway, so everyone can look at me as they walk by and I can be distracted by everyone looking at me. That was the first thing I tried to fix.

Apart from the fact that they need to be ironed, I think my curtains were a beautiful addition. They even matched! The HR people didn't agree, and I got told to take them down. Idiots. I also wrote a note on my window: "Please don't feed the editors." Apparently someone didn't think that was as funny as I did, because it had been erased the next morning. So I decided to embrace the fishbowl theme, and I got a goldfish and named him Marty.

And then my friend bought me some other friends.

I'm kind of amazed I haven't been told to take those down yet. It's probably because nobody important has been up to visit lately. (And yes, my curtains are still sitting there in defiance.)

So I embraced the fishbowl. But then there was the noise. Everyone is in one big room. Major problem. So someone decided to pipe in white noise to drown out the people noise. Now it sounds like I'm on an airplane. Great. After a few weeks of going home with a headache every day, I decided to invest in some headphones, some very pricey Bose noise-cancelling headphones. I can't do most of my work while listening to music, so I just needed to get rid of the noise. They work really well, but they also heighten the sense of being in a fishbowl since it sounds like I'm under water all the time.

Then there's the fact that there was a severe lack of thinking going on when the space was designed (yes, even apart from the obvious). The temperature sensors that control the heat for my area are on the outside of the windows. Yeah, brilliant. So on top of everything, I'm always freezing, and there's nothing anybody can do about it. And I refuse to fork out even more money to make my space workable. Thankfully, our new manager came to my rescue and said I could order a space heater. I hope it will work.

As for now, when I walk into the building in the morning, I can feel the life getting sucked out of me. I get to my space, wrap myself in a blanket, put on a jacket, turn on my headphones, and try to shut the world out. A designer I work with came and visited me last week and told me the new space has changed me. According to him, I'm much less approachable and much more closed off than I ever was in my office. Yep. By trying to get to a place where I can do my job, I've effectively cut everyone out. I don't know how to fix that. I've tried taking my headphones off, but then I start wanting to shoot people who don't know how to shut up. And that's not good.

One solution is working from home, and I do that about once a week when I don't have a meeting or another reason I have to be in the building. It's really, really nice to go to work dressed like this:

And there's no noise unless I'm making it. And I can easily go on a Slurpee run during the day. But I get lonely. Yes, I'm an introvert, but not so much that I can handle having zero human interaction all day. I know, I know, there's just no pleasing me. But what do I do? I either go to a place I dread, where I try to shut everything out but am constantly under stress because people are always watching me and walking up behind me and listening to any conversation I have, or I stay at home and feel like a shut-in, which makes me crazy. I don't know what to do. All I know is that I now have a permanent headache and I'm starting to get seriously depressed. I keep telling myself to just breathe; it will get better. But what if it doesn't? I just need to get out.

Side note: I used to want a fish tank with lots of exotic fish in my house. I don't anymore. I think I'd just feel sorry for the fish.