Used Office Furniture

Some time ago, I started a blog about cubicle culture. It started as a form of promotion for a book I had written about office cubicle decorating. The blog is entitled “YouCube”  and the book had been accepted by an agent who wanted to pitch it to a publisher.

Unfortunately, after making me spend hours and hours re-writing the proposal three times to meet her perception of what the publishers were looking for, the agent in question vanished off the face of the earth, had her telephone disconnected and has never surfaced again. At least not in the publishing world.

As an experiment and to learn about using google adsense, I placed google ads on this blog. Much to my surprise, I started to get clicks from people looking to buy used office furniture. This was absolutely unintentional – I was more interested in learning how to use a wordpress blog and how to place google ads on a blog.

The blog now just sits there doing nothing – but still makes me an income from the google ads. It is not a highly trafficked website, but it more than pays for the hosting of all my sites and leaves me with some pocket money.

I would never have considered that used office furniture, and for some reason, office chairs are reasonable earners. Who knew?

So – even though the book is now consigned to sitting waiting for a publisher – I leaned something and made money from it. I also found some interesting information about Robert Probst, the inventor of the modern office cubicle. It is fair to say the idea was bastardized to the point where he despised what was done to it – but the accountants won out as usual office cubicle are more akin to chicken coops than any sort of place I would want to work.

His original idea was a modern replacement for the “bull pens” that made up the office spaces of the day until the cubicle. He had planned it to give a modicum of privacy whilst allowing workers to easily interact with each other. After seeing what the desiogn was then turned into he said, “Lots of businesses are run by crass people who create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rat-hole places.”

So I get the impression he was not best pleased with the development of his office cubicle idea.