Privacy Pole

I start my new position on Monday, and I have been to see my new cube. It has a privacy pole. That's a term coined by my friend Ming (who also has one) for the huge, round, wallpaper-covered pole that holds up the floor or building. Mine sits on the lefthand side (if you're facing into the cube, as you usually are when you're typing, although with a laptop, I'm not sure that's a given) and takes up about 20-25% of the available space. I am not keen on a big pole taking up so much of my space, even though I'll be in a bigger cube than I was in before, and I've been pondering how to spruce it up a bit. Mean Mr. Mustard jokes about my worries about "decorating my pole at work", but sometimes you have to go with the double entendre to get anything done. After all, "I need to consider how to minimize the visual impact of that wallpaper-covered, three-foot diameter structural support artifact in my cube" takes too damn long to say. Then again, maybe I should just talk about decorating my three foot pole at work so that quoting me is a scary proposition.

I think the best idea, rather than a Maypole motif, or a holidays-rotating thing, like a candy cane, would be to put circular bookshelves around the thing. Just figure out the arc and the measurements and build bookshelves curving around the front, about four feet high. Tall Brad assures me facilities wouldn't like it, but they're not plugged in to anything, and facilities wouldn't do much if I just had books stacked there without shelves. I did notice that if you put pole and decorate into Google, you learn that many communities have street light pole decorating competitions. I wonder if there's a chance that I could organize a privacy pole decoration competition at work - maybe I could get an award for being all pro-beautifying the workplace.

Hmm...one more bit of freethinking...a totem pole might be cool, and maybe I could claim a religious right so they couldn't tear it down. I could decorate it with the various symbols from my projects at work...Unity symbol, that sort of thing. Let me know if you have any good ideas.