..In my office people seem to pay attention to who has the nicer seating location, with people who are better-regarded by managers and having higher pay grades generally getting the nicer seats (rooms with doors that close and have windows to the outside, for example). There was a particular guy who was so obsessed with the seating arrangement that he would sit in his manager's office when his manager was out of town, believing that doing so would elevate him in the eyes of others and hasten his promotion to that desk. He normally sat in a walkway-facing cubicle with no direct window access. One of his teammates quit abruptly to go work for a competitor, leaving the window seat next to the office of his boss open. Poor guy was out of the office that day, and while he was out we decided to pull a fast one.
There was a woman, fairly junior on the team, who had left for extended sick leave and had not been seen for months. We decided to give her the fancy seat. Three of us spent about an hour meticulously swapping stuff from her old desk to her new one, and arranging it all so that it looked like she'd been in. We even had a female accomplice write an updated "out of office" message on her new (larger) dry erase board with more current dates on it. We had no sooner finished our work than another individual came walking by and caught the three of us red-handed. He assessed the cubicle briefly, and looked at me. I smirked and asked "well, what do you think?"
The guy absolutely flew off the handle. Apparently he thought HE was in line for that seat. He stomped up and down the hallway cussing up a storm about managers this and no-show good for nothing thats... while the three of us looked at each other like "holy eff, we need to get out of here!" In the end we let him in on the prank to calm him down, and he seemed a little embarrassed (but perhaps not as much as he should have).
On Monday when the intended victim arrived, he didn't even blink and just set about relocating all of the absent employee's stuff back to her old desk, and by lunchtime he had moved in and was sitting with his feet on the desk and a look of utter satisfaction on his face.
Oh well, can't win 'em all ... but at least the unintended victim made it halfway worthwhile.
My desk on the other hand is tucked in deep in a corner, next to the copier room and behind the shred bin. I could take a nap or just not show up at all and most days nobody would even notice. That has its benefits ... but it does get lonely in the corner sometimes and I'll find myself creeping out of the hole to find someone to talk to (everyone else who doesn't have a door has 2-3 neighbors he can see / talk to from his desk), and the cleaning people don't always remember to empty my trash. To paraphrase DRWeig, they pay me well enough to sit in the closet if that's where they want me. I was at a bar having drinks with a project manager the other night, and he made a remark about not being paid enough. I didn't want to tip my hand too much, so I knocked 20% off of my salary and asked whether that's what an engr project manager made in his corner of the office. He laughed and said he was a little under half of that to which I replied "well, everybody has their own things that motivate them" and abruptly changed the subject to the sunset we were watching.
