Standing on the cubicle #tinychallenges

I really hated working in tech support. It wasn't that I was bad at it; in fact, my call stats, both calls taken and bouncebacks, were some of the best in the company. I learned quickly, I answered correctly and I wanted to jump off a bridge every moment of it. The highest I ever jumped was when my boss told me to stop standing on top of my desk.

There is no memory in my mind that explains what made me decide to do it the first time, but over a period of about a week, I routinely found myself taking calls while standing on top of my cubicle desk. My cube was up against the windows and one desk away from the corner, so I had one of the best views in the company, despite being one of the newest members fo the team. The room we were in wasn't that small, holding less than 20 techs, but it was probably a couple thousand square feet at the least. The two teams that were housed there had grown close, so no one thought much of it when I decided sitting in the chair was no longer acceptable.

In my defense, I was 22, it was my first job and I was chained teathered to a desk for the first time in my life. The transition from being able to set my own hours with no boss was not going all that well.

The boss was walking up the back hallway and I happened to catch his eye as his hand went up, one finger pointing down... it was time to jump back down to the floor and sit in my chair.

In the years since that incident, I've had the opportunity to stand on top of many, many desks, and I have never shied away from doing so, even at inopportune times. You get a much different perspective when you're standing on your desk, and sometimes, that's just the change you need to break through whatever problem is vexing you. I should have realized that the problem vexing me was working in a call center earlier than I did. Maybe if I had continued to stand on that desk, in spite of my boss' hand gesture, maybe I would have figured that out more quickly than I did.