There I'll have an office. I haven't had a cubicle in three years. I never hung so much as a postcard on these white walls, it's true. But I did have an enclosed box, and the sounds all but stopped when I shut my door. Noise floats over the top of cubicles like water flooding over the bulkheads of the Titanic .
Cubicles have no doors.
Last time I worked in a cubicle, I had to use earplugs and move my workspace twice to keep off the office's main street. This move has been easier on me than on some of my co-workers. Before my leave last December, I trucked a lot of personal stuff home. JeffsLife business cards, printed with trembling expectation two years ago but that now bear e-mail addresses and URLs hopelessly out of date. Red foil wrapping paper for Jill's birthday in 1999.