Please Don't Feed The Animals.

They say that you should be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.

That may be the case in my current world.

Last week I wrote about the joys of our new cubicles. We were able to move a few feet away and escape the noise and crowd caused by the nearby conference rooms. So far, so good, right?

Well, it turns out that we may have inadvertently jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire with our little relocation.

You see, our new row of 6 cubicles is next to a major walkway here, and is one of the first set of actual workspaces you'll come to after coming in the door. We're on the left side of a building divided pretty much in three parts – parts one and three contain cubes, and part two in the middle is all conference rooms, HR offices, and coffee stations.

Several times a day, someone from HR leads a group of applicants, vendors, out of town visitors, etc. on a tour of the building. During the grand tour they take them by the conference areas, the coffee pots, the lunchroom, and then they show them an example of a typical workstation.

Our workstations.

So upwards of 8 times a day I'll look up and see anywhere from 2 to 10 people staring at me, while the tour guide explains that this is what a typical work area here looks like. Two monitors, a computer of some sort, and a book shelf (if you've asked nicely). They'll stand at the end of the row for a minute or so – their visitor badges firmly clipped onto their lapels - and they'll stare at us, like we're subjects in some bizarre workplace experiment…

…or the zoo. Yes, now I know what those pacing tigers behind the steel bars are thinking when they're being stared at all day long.

I wouldn't mind being the demo of the "typical employee" if indeed we really were typical. My department has a lot of leeway that a lot of others groups don't get – we have our own desks (several groups share theirs with their overnight counterparts), and as such we've been able to decorate our workspaces to show our own artistic style. My co-worker next to me has a desk filled with cool Stewie from "Family Guy" paraphernalia. The lady across from me has little plastic horsies. And me? I'm a Disney guy – you all know that. So I'm sure that these poor nervous interviewees aren't getting the "real" picture of what life is like here by staring at us slackers.

My manager has joked that the next time the tour comes by we should all put our feet up on our desks and pretend that we're asleep. I was just thinking I'd sit up and beg for marshmallows.