The Saddest Office Cubicles We Could Find

In 2007, WIRED.com (then known as “Wired News”) asked readers with particularly depressing office cubicles to submit photos of their plight. People hated their cubicles—and rightly so. They didn’t offer any real privacy, but were incredibly effective at communicating office hierarchy. The hatred of this terrible design was clear: Our gallery of “winners” of the saddest-cubicle contest still holds the record for WIRED’s most popular post ever.

Today, WIRED is in the midst of its own office redesign, casting off the last vestiges of cubiclean separation to join the popular open-floor-plan mania that has overtaken offices in Silicon Valley and beyond. In recognition of this pivotal moment in American workplace-design history, we’re resurrecting the long-forgotten saddest-cubicle gallery, and issuing a new call for submissions.

Please send us photos of your sad “workspace.” The new open plans have mercifully eliminated some of the worst aspects of cubicles, but exacerbated others and introduced some new problems as well. Is your desk in a super busy area of your office? Have you been left with zero real estate? We want to know.

Tweet a photo of your depressing workspace to us @wired using the hashtag #SadDesk, and if your situation is depressing enough, this moment in your time as an employee could go down in workplace history.*

Originally posted on Nov. 2, 2007:

By Julie Sloane

The winner — if you can call it winning — of the Wired News saddest-cubicles contest is David Gunnells, an IT guy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His desk is penned in by heavily used filing cabinets in a windowless conference room, near a poorly ventilated bathroom and a microwave. The overhead light doesn’t work — his mother-in-law was so saddened by his cube that she gave him a lamp — and the other side of the wall is a parking garage. Gunnells recalls a day when one co-worker reheated catfish in the microwave, while another used the bathroom and covered the smell with a stinky air freshener. Lovely.

*If your photo makes us sad enough, we may publish it on WIRED.com. Your photo may be cropped or edited and may be published in any medium.

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