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The Declining Health of the Cubicle Minion
My workplace may be trying to kill me
The thing I hated most about my former desk job wasn’t the mixed messages from management. It wasn’t that my butt was parked in a dark, windowless cubicle in the kind of space where plants slowly die under florescent light. It wasn’t that tasks saw constant interruption, to the point where achieving a Flow State was as likely as a unicorn walking through the office.
No, the thing I hated the most about my desk job was that in the 18 months following my hire, I gained 30 lbs.
Thirty. Whole. Pounds.
An average gain of 3–4 lbs per month, or 13.6 kg of net gain in a year and a half if you’d prefer to read my pain in metric increments.
I’m not even rounding up for emphasis — just rounding out until I needed new pants.
This isn’t vanity — this is a health concern
My stomach pain was the worst it had ever been. My chronic back pain was the worst it had ever been. My triglycerides finally reached the threshold where my doctor stopped saying, “let’s keep an eye on that,” and started saying, “you need to make some changes.”
If this were just about buying new pants, I would have grumbled, bought the damn pants and…
