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Admin
Honestly I newer once understood the desire to decorate your workplace. I always preferred to keep mine clear of all personal items so as to enforce a strict division between my private life and my professional one. The only thing I ever personalize, if you can call it that, is my desktop background. And only so that I don't have to spend time staring at something ugly.
Admin
I always have my TheDailyWTF mug in the office. It's nice to take it to meetings.
Admin
Never underestimate power of the number of brains to find a solution. Ten idiots can easily outperform one idiot.
Admin
I would take offense to a "Reunite Gondwonaland" poster as well. It's Gondwanaland, not Gondwonaland!
Admin
@LZ79LRU: Agree. My in-an-office workspaces have always been devoid of anything not essential. My coffee cup & cup warmer ~~are~~ were essential. Other than that my workspace always looked the same as it did just after I had quit.
A desktop (or phone / tablet) background should be a soothing low saturation monochrome. The idea of picking out icons hiding in a snapshot of your kids or SO or some vacation scene, real or imagined, is nuts. Likewise some abstract fling of colors and lines. Just no.
Admin
The managers were probably afraid that Marie was trying to organize some sort of communist insurrection that would have gotten them sent to the Gulag or something.
They must have been really scared if they felt the need for 5 of them to gang up against Marie.
Admin
I'm generally a desk decorator, but currently I'm in a hoteling situation, so I don't have a permanent desk. I could have one, if I wanted to stop WFH a few days a week, but… I don't.
(Company's in an odd space of having more work than people and more people than desks)
Admin
FWIW, M is now retired and happily programming for fun, undoubtably surrounded by more bizarre geek humor.
Admin
Heh heh. I once decorated an office of mine with a poster illustrating penises of the animal kingdom. My manager at the time told me to put it so it wasn't facing an outside window, which I did.
Admin
At my worst job I put Despair Inc. Demotivators posters up around my desk. HR told me to take them down. Around the same time I had a nervous breakdown due to overwork.
Admin
You guys don't have kids? Where else are you going to put that self-portrait made out of macaroni?
Admin
Oh man, yeah, I used to work at a training company, and in the staff room (where the public never went) we hung up some posters. The boss got furious, our manager went to bat for us. The posters stayed, but she got fired like a week later.
Admin
Gondwonaland must be where al the Netwon's cradles come from.
Admin
Damn you, Muphry's Law.
Admin
I once got called into HR for calling someone pedantic. both the listener AND HR thought I was calling them a child molester...
Admin
Odds are someone abbreviated Pangean Liberation Front to PLF and things went down from there.
Admin
People decorate their offices for the same reason they post on Facebook et al: to project a desired image to those around them. Put up silly posters and knickknacks to look goofy and fun, get a stack of books to look smart, show some family photos and kids' creations to look homey, scatter some papers around to look busy, keep your space sterile and spartan to look serious and focused... its all about the image, whether you do it consciously or not. And management does the same on a corporate level by its policies towards individual expression plus managing the appearance of shared spaces. I remember working in a place where the new management changed all the walls from a warm orange to stark white, completely changed the tone of the office overnight.
I'm so glad I don't work in an office anymore.
Admin
God save us from people who can't use a dictionary. In my naivete as a child, I asked my teacher what "liter" meant because it was in our week's spelling list. "It's, um, uh... another way to spell 'lighter.'" I looked it up on my own.
Admin
All these comments are a stark reminder of how horrible MBAs have made the workplace.
40 years ago personalizing your workplace was normal. So was working at one place for many years. Wages kept up with and often exceeded inflation. (Yes, there were ugly bits too. Blatant sexism and racism, etc.)
It makes me sad that anyone under 40, their only experience of the workplace probably features aggressive extermination of anything human. Life should not be like that.
Admin
I was chastised at my last job for having "Splunk FTW!" in my ~Lync~ Skype for Business status line (I was the splunk admin) because someone saw it and thought FTW meant "Fuck The World".
Admin
Well, there was the time (2001 some time, I think) I stumbled across a magnificent piece of photography in some sort of PDF-format HP marketing material, a close-up of an elephant taken from directly behind a certain ... orifice, let's say.
So I zoomed it suitably and showed it full-screen, then screenshotted it and saved it. For the next two years after that, the desktop wallpaper on my in-office(1) work machine was "Elephants Arse.bmp"...(2)
(1) i.e. not the one I had for the occasional "do not disturb" work-from-home days...
(2) Nobody seemed to care even slightly.
Admin
My current situation is that I come into the office one day a week and have an assigned desk (yeah!). My away from home desk has a solitary digital frame with photos of my family. I'm not here often enough to decorate more than that. The bookshelves in my home office are decorated with geeky Lego sets, and sci-fi and fantasy books share space with reference manuals.
I doubt the managers had an issue with Pangaea - almost everyone knows the name of that supercontinent. Gowandaland is lesser known; perhaps the managers thought it was some lesser-known nation going through a civil war or trying to be recognized.
Admin
I know this might be hard to understand, but the reason I put up a poster, is because I like looking at the poster.
Admin
Even though my kid is almost ready to get their first professional office, I still have their artwork on my walls in the office. Partly, yes, to project an image of myself to my co-workers, but moreso to be continually reminded of my priorities outside those walls. Can't imagine working with blank walls around.
Admin
I once had a coworker complain to my boss that I had a picture of my family on my desk. To quote, "The world is overcrowded and he is flaunting the fact that he has made it worse."
At one large financial firm in Manhattan that I worked at, there were coworkers who were assigned cubicles next to a window, but because they didn't have the proper status, another cubicle wall was added preventing them from looking out the window when sitting.
Admin
I have always made my workplace a conversation starter. I have been an IT manager, a technical support manager, a customer experience/success manager/director/VP, and my roles have always involved me working with every part of the company. I have used my office- physical when I was in-person and virtual now that I've been remote for 5+ years, to start conversations. From the bowl of Haribo gummi bears that sat on my desk for 15+ years (not the same ones) that brought people in and allowed me to get to know every person in the company, to my current library-office with 3 walls of floor-to-ceiling books that inspires questions about whether or not it's a background and what we all like to read. I've been very fortunate in being able to select and work in roles where I was interested and passionate about what I did. I brought my whole self to work, and my office has always been a part of that. WRT separation between work and personal life, I have never in my life responded to the question, "What do you do?" with a response that is work related. I have clearer lines now than I used to have, and actively do not work when I'm not working.
Admin
The fourth poster in that collection should have been about improving education... How about: Knowledge is power! Power to the people!
Admin
"Not just blatantly political, but also offensive to many of your co-workers." I would ask around which cow-orkers were offended. And try to educate those.
Admin
Honestly I do what I do because I feel that when you try and bring home into the workplace and make it "comfortable" it always turns out intensely and obviously fake.
Like I am not saying work can't be fun and that you can't hang out with people there etc. It absolutely can be. But it is still a working environment where you are surrounded by work colleagues and not home and friends. So a certain distance must be maintained.
At the end of the day your job is not your life. It's just something you do for money that you than use to spend on your actual life. And if that distance is not maintained you can be trapped into mistaking one for the other at your own peril.
Admin
Should not it be spelled the Pangaea Liberation Front?
Admin
I used to decorate my desk with Dilbert comics, at least in the early Dilbert days when it wasn't totally mainstream and was actually good. And you get to understand who in your team understand sarcasm.
Later, some Office Space meme made for some superb cubicle material.
Extracts from the Demotivators® Wall Calendar are also pretty good. From far away they look fine till someone's reading the tiny punch line. The procrastination one is still my best ever favorite, I used to have it behind my desk. Demotivators® Wall Calendar Extracts from the
Admin
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Marie didn’t get that “political” was widely understood to mean — this almost certainly having taken place in the USA — “not in line with Young Earth creationist (or similar) interpretations of the Bible”.
Admin
A coworker (management levewl), once had a "cheesecake pin-up" picture on his desk. It was faced so you had to walk into his office, walk around to his side of the desk (i.e. it was facing his chair, and not otherwise visible)... One day he got a complaint..... the twist was that it was a professional shot of his daughter.
Admin
One might argue that the posters are an insult to anyone who isn't sufficiently educated to get the jokes. Surprising (or perhaps not) that so many managers fell into that category.
Admin
Attempting to identify who might have complained would be a spectacularly bad idea.
Admin
I used to have Far Side cartoons (taken from calendars, so good sized and coloured). Those lasted for a couple of buildings, but in the next one there weren't suitable surfaces to display them. Now we are hotdesking, so all I have is a painting my daughter made (a semi-abstract kind of thing that gives the impression of space and stars). I like it, and it's a nice way to think of my family now and then during the day.