The Cubicle Celebrates 40 Years

I don't know that I'd really call this a celebration. For most of my professional career I have managed to avoid sitting in one, but there has been a time or two in which I have been stuck. I am not a fan.

"The cubicle celebrates its 40th birthday this month. A party is unlikely.

What’s to celebrate? The cubicle office system is one of the most derided realities of modern work life.

Somehow, the spaces that white-collar worker bees unlovingly refer to as “cubes” have become an icon for all that is confining, uninspiring, soulless and humdrum in our workaday lives.

Warrens. Honeycombs. Cube farms. Even “veal-fattening pens.”

The sarcasm — cynicism — wrapped around those fabric-covered panels is remarkable for a system marketed back in 1968 as the Action Office.

Bad rap?

“This was a wonderful concept,” Joe Schwartz said. He was the marketing director at Herman Miller in Michigan when the furniture company shopped a new office system concept around the country.

Schwartz, now 82, retired and living in Scottsdale, Ariz., spent a fair amount of time in Kansas City back then because Hallmark Cards was one of the first adopters of the Action Office.

The late Robert Propst at Herman Miller gets credit for the design, although some of his ideas were lost in translation, Schwartz said.

The basic idea of movable walls was a beautiful thing for employers and employees. For management, reconfiguring space could be accomplished without costly and messy drywall work. Employees gained storage, some privacy, even shelves.

In the initial design, Schwartz said, workers could have desks at two levels, one for sitting and one for standing.

“Propst had the idea that sitting wasn’t good for you and that people could both sit and stand at work and that would improve their health,” Schwartz said.

The Action Office met with some resistance. Managers wondered if privacy was such a good idea. Cost, as always, was an issue. Desks on two levels?

But the biggest alteration was that the cubicles shrunk in response to demands on office space, Schwartz said."

For the full story please click here.

Angry With G-d

This morning marked the fourth anniversary of my father's triple bypass. Two days later my daughter was born. It was the culmination of a very difficult period of time for me.

All of this has been discussed and dissected here more than once. I discussed some of those thoughts in a post called I Yelled At G-d.

Today I am here again with a new post called Angry With G-d. I suppose that this is one of those posts where I shake out the cobwebs and try to make sense of a few things that are bouncing around inside my head.

I don't believe that you'll find anything unusual here. I am not the first person to feel these things and I won't be the last. I am not offering ideas or solutions because I think that it is an individual matter.

(Side note) Before I get any farther into this I need to give proper credit to my chevrusa The Rebbetzin's Husband. The good rav's post Of Synagogue Dress Codes and Dress-Up Judaism set me off on this particular ride through the dark. To be clear, I had intended to write an entirely different post than this one, and may still do so. But that remains to be seen.

And here we go:

Someone I care very much for and I have been wrestling over multiple issues. I don't expect or need for them to agree with me on all of them. It really doesn't bother me whether they agree or not. Most of the time I appreciate the back and forth of the debate. It is good to be challenged.

One of the on going discussions we have is whether there is a G-d. At this stage they have decided that they are an atheist. I can tell you why I believe in G-d. I can give you a list of reasons but they're not the kind that are likely to bowl you over and make you shout hallelujah.

They call it faith because it requires a suspension of disbelief. I have gone through periods of time in which I didn't believe. I have moments now where I shake my head and wonder what the hell I am doing. Moments where I do the proverbial fist shaking at the sky and consider myself to be a fool.

Let me provide you with a list of some of the experiences I have had during my short 39 years on the big blue marble.

I know two people who were murdered.
I can name five friends who died from the complications brought on by brain tumors. None of them lived past 34.

I have a baby cousin who is fighting off a brain tumor right now. She is all of 26. At the moment she is doing well, but the odds are not good.

I have another dear friend who is fighting off a rare form of cancer. The docs don't know what the outcome will be, but she wonders if she'll live to be 40.

Then there is the list of those who died in accidents, motorcycle, DUI, biking in Europe, seizure in the bathtub and more.

And that my friends is the incomplete list. It doesn't include the blog friends who have lost their children.

In short I could share much more information with you about these tragedies. I have a strong enough command of the language to paint a picture that provides the background on these souls and how these events have impacted those who loved them.

It would be improper to claim that I was exceptionally close with all of them. It is important to note that those with cancer come from all over the country. I can't point to one central location that had radioactive fallout or exposure to carcinogens for being the source of their illnesses.

But I can tell you that I find it to be senseless. I can say without hesitation that I hate responses where people tell me that we just don't understand G-d's plan. It is a cop out. It is a weak excuse that works for some people because you can just shrug your shoulders and say well, there is a reason.

I don't buy it. I don't believe it. I can't accept it. I don't need to have answers to everything. I want to. I want a crystal ball. I want to know if the decisions that I make today are good or bad. I want to know so many things.

And so I go back to faith. I yell at the thing/person/force/whatever that we view as our higher power and say the following: "Some of this is FUCKED UP. I don't apologize for cursing. I don't feel badly, not one whit.

If I look at our liturgy, if I dig into the lessons I have learned, the tefillot and believe in rachmones, believe in love and kindness than I can do that and be ok.

Because if I have faith that there is a G-d than the one I believe in isn't going to cast me out for being angry, asking why or railing on about the injustice. Am I supposed to sit back during the Three Weeks and not do any of these things.

Am I supposed to be a human being or an automaton. I know what my answer is. I know what I believe...today that is.

Life is filled with so many different events and changes. I can't say that one day I won't change my mind about this or that I will. All I can do is wake up and see what the day brings.

These Just Make Me Laugh

Soon to Be Appearing at: First International Jewish Bloggers Conference

Yes, folks that is right old Jack is going to be leaving on a jet plane to attend the First International Jewish Bloggers Conference.

I am going to have the privilege of taking a Nefesh B'Nefesh flight to Israel alongside some new olim. As part of the festivities I'll take some time to speak with one of the families and provide you with a glimpse as to who they are and why they decided to make aliyah.

After the flight I'll tool on over to the First International Jewish Bloggers Conference in Yerushalayim. It ought to be great, 5 people speaking and a 1000 attendees with their heads bent over anxiously typing away as they live blog the conference.

Now if I only can find a cool happy face mask, like the one the guy below is wearing. ;)

The Value of a Mistake

Rabbi Daniel Gordis' has issued another dispatch called When Mistakes Are Worth Making that I suggest you read. It discusses the value of the Kuntar exchange, the disengagement and why these mistakes were necessary.

"So, in the face of all the good arguments about how no self-respecting country trades a almost two hundred dead bodies and several living terrorists including Samir Kuntar (who, we should recall, shot a man at point blank range in front of his four-year-old daughter, and then killed the girl by smashing her skull against a rock with the butt of his rifle – and all this at the ripe old age of 17) for two soldiers who were almost certainly dead, how does one justify this decision? Wasn’t it certainly a mistake?

Yes, in strategic terms, it was probably a mistake. But sometimes mistakes are worth making. Take the Disengagement. It is now clear that the Disengagement from Gaza was a horrifying, costly and still painful mistake. But – and I realize that this is not a popular position – it was a mistake that Israel needed to make. It was the mistake that proved, once and for all, that the enemies we face have no interest in a state of their own. They just want to destroy ours. That is what Israelis learned, now without a doubt, as a result of the Disengagement. There’s almost no one left around here myopic enough to imagine even for an instant that further retreats will get us peace. OK, there are still a few arm-chair peace-niks in the States, insisting that there is simply no conflict that cannot be resolved. But here? Precisely the opposite. Now we know that the right was correct – further retreats will only embolden our enemies. They’ll demand more. And more. Until we’re gone.

The benefits of that lesson are understandably of no consolation to the families who paid so dearly in the summer of 2005, who are still living in temporary housing, whose marriages didn’t survive, whose livelihoods have never been restored, whose children hate the country that did that to their parents – but despite all that, the Disengagement was probably a horrifying mistake that Israel needed to make. For now we know, even those of us (and I include myself) who were naive enough to imagine something else. Peace is not around the corner. Peace is not a year or two away. Peace is not possible. Not now. Not a year from now. Not a decade from now. Because their issue isn’t a Palestinian State it’s the end of the Jewish one. We learned that through the mistake we made in 2005, a mistake that we probably needed to make.

And that’s why we had to make the trade this week. Yes, according to a variety of strategic criteria, the trade was problematic. It may raise the price for Gilad Shalit (not that those negotiations have been going anywhere, of course). It may affect future prisoners of war.

But if it was a mistake, it was a calculated mistake, a mistake well worth making.It was a mistake worth making when we think about what is the real challenge facing Israel. The challenge facing Israel isn’t to win the war against the Palestinians. The war can’t be won. We can’t eradicate them, and they won’t accept our being here. The challenge that Israel faces is not to move towards peace. Peace can’t be had. No – the challenge facing Israel is to learn how to live in perpetual, never-ending war, and in the face of that, to flourish, and to be a country that our kids still want to defend. And that is what we did this week."

Another Monday Morning- Slap The Happy Out

Jefferson On The Bible

The LA Times has an interesting story about Thomas Jefferson's bible. Take a look at this:

"Making good on a promise to a friend to summarize his views on Christianity, Thomas Jefferson set to work with scissors, snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.Then, relying on a cut-and-paste technique, he reassembled the excerpts into what he believed was a more coherent narrative and pasted them onto blank paper -- alongside translations in French, Greek and Latin.

In a letter sent from Monticello to John Adams in 1813, Jefferson said his "wee little book" of 46 pages was based on a lifetime of inquiry and reflection and contained "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man."

He called the book "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth." Friends dubbed it the Jefferson Bible. It remains perhaps the most comprehensive expression of what the nation's third president and principal author of the Declaration of Independence found ethically interesting about the Gospels and their depiction of Jesus.

"I have performed the operation for my own use," he continued, "by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter, which is evidently his and which is as easily distinguished as diamonds in a dunghill."

The little leather-bound tome, several facsimiles of which are kept at the Huntington Library in San Marino, continues to fascinate scholars exploring the powerful and varied relationships between the Founding Fathers and the most sacred book of the Western World.

The big question now, said Lori Anne Ferrell, a professor of early modern history and literature at Claremont Graduate University, is this:

"Can you imagine the reaction if word got out that a president of the United States cut out Bible passages with scissors, glued them onto paper and said, 'I only believe these parts?' "

I'll answer Ferrell's question. In today's America you cannot be elected unless you profess to believe in G-d. And even then, if you don't believe in the right G-d you probably still cannot be elected.