I probably mentioned how at work we’ve got about 50 ppl sardined into a space that was once ideal for about 20 ppl, right? Well, when I started, I couldn’t have a desk ’cause there was neither the furniture nor the room. There’s a front area that had six cubicles when I was there last. Now, all the cubicles but one have been removed (the office manager gets to keep hers because she needs some privacy and personal space, which is so cool (’cause she’s so cool)). And the five people who were in those cubicles, then turned their desks around and pushed them against the walls. Then, two tables were put in the middle for two new people to sit at.

But instead of sitting at one of the tables, there was this spot where two desk-ends jutted out into the room, so I put my laptop down at the end of the jut, and was pretty happy with that space. Then, the guy who started the same day as me, and the guy who started a week after me took the two tables in the middle of the room. (Ya, srsly, three new people in the last two weeks. We’re at 55 ppl now.) (And there’s another new person starting next week, and by the way we’re looking for designers, too.)

So yesterday a new table arrived. My friend B- whose desk end made up 50% of my temp-desk and who knows me from way back unpacked the table and set it up off to the side so I could move and have my own table.

Here I could tell all sorts of hilarious stories about how every single person who walks by that space has to comment on how I have a desk now (either because I’m right in their way or because they spent a week feeling sorry for my plight stuck at the end of two other guys’ desks) and how B- keeps putting up signs encouraging talk about my desk. But that’s not the point.

Getting closer to the point is that I left my desk at lunch, and when I came back, one of the programmers C- was standing in the space between my new desk and B-‘s desk, talking to B-. And, as I came up, he put a hand on my chair. So I fake-glared at him and was about to say something weird and goofy-posturing like, “get away from my office-space”, but then he pulled out my chair for me. “Oh,” said I, “I was going to tell you to get your hands off my chair, but then you were a gentleman and now I look like a jerk.”

Some time later, my boss was by and he commented on how my table is bigger than the tables that the other two new guys have. “hah!” I said, pointing at them, “In. Your. Face!”

But instead of getting the joke, they just looked stunned.

Later I said to B-, “I have to remember that I can’t make jokes about thinking I’m more important than people who don’t know me well enough to know I don’t actually think I’m more important than them. Now I just look like a jerk.”

“Listen,” said B-, “if you keep looking like a jerk, maybe this should point you to a certain conclusion about yourself.”