If Plants Had Emotions, They'd Feel Fear

At one of my previous jobs, I sat at a cubicle. Actually, at almost all of my past workplaces I have been in a cubicle. Sometimes I've been at an actual hardwood desk, but out in the open along with everyone else around me. Once I actually had an office, with a door that closed, a window that opened and a thermostat that worked. Then the people in charge of the building realized I had an office and they kicked me out so a tenured professor could move in there. I ended up in another cubicle.

But I'm thinking of a particular cubicle. It was the middle one in a row of three cubes. Undergraduate student workers sat in the one in front of me, running interference with anyone who wandered into our office from the main lobby. The cube behind mine nominally also sat waiting for a student employee to work on "special projects." But since we never had anything special to do, it mainly held reams of paper and boxes of Starbucks grounds for the nearby coffee machine. To my right, a row of tall gray file cabinets, all of them holding sensitive information on individual students, none of them locked because no one knew how to fix the electronic combinations. To my left, a bare blank wall.

Into this cubicle came a cactus. A co-worker friend (thankfully, I had a lot of friends amongst my co-workers) gave it to me as a birthday present. Or maybe a Christmas present. Or maybe it had just been on sale and she bought one for me. I don't really remember. But she got it for me, and I set it up in my cubicle. It looked a lot like this:

(image courtesy of Desert Canyon Gifts, which is not where my friend bought my cactus)

I really liked having it around. It was a pleasant little green beacon on top of the yellow-brown formica desk where I kept my stacks of gray folders. (I'm not exaggerating the drabness here - the branch of the department I worked for had gray colored files. Other people worked with the purple, red or green cases. I had the gray ones.)

I didn't have much access to anything that you could classify as not "office oppressive." Fluorescent light twitched above me all day. The nearest window peeked out of the conference room door to the right of the front student cubicle. Having the cactus gave me a little dose of nature, without all the pressure of something you have to take too much care of. The little instructions card stuck in the dirt it came in said to water it once a week. So I did, every Thursday at 2pm. I set up a reminder on my Outlook calendar and everything. What could go wrong?

After a few months, a small brown spot appeared on one of the folds. It didn't seem like a big deal, I didn't pay much attention to it. After a week, it grew bigger. It looked like I had a battle-damaged cactus. Nevertheless, I still didn't think it was a problem. Plants get things on them all time, and eventually they go away. Besides, a cactus can live in the desert for decades - surely it can survive a stretch of time in my field of gray.

Once the third splotch had appeared and the needles started to sag, I began asking people around the office for their opinion. "That don't look right," was the general consensus. Everyone agreed that they had never seen anything like it. No one had any ideas what I should do to fix it. I kept watering it every Thursday, hoping that regular hydration would allow it to gather its strength and overcome its situation.

During my cactus' final week, it slowly collapsed upon itself, like a poorly made souffle. By the last day, it lay deflated, almost completely flat in its pot. I honestly don't know what's inside of a healthy cactus, but whatever it was had rotted away. Its vibrant green completely replaced by ugly brown. You could barely tell where the dirt ended and the cactus began. Knowing we had gone beyond the point of no return, I unceremoniously dumped it into the trash can next to my desk. I never got another companion, plant or animal, to help spruce up that drab cubicle.

Why I Am Awesome: Someone thought of me while doing some horticultural shopping and picked up a gift to help brighten my day. Such a gesture seems small, but I'm lucky to have people who think of me and do nice things for me.

Why I Am Not Awesome: I killed a cactus. This was a plant designed to live in the harshest of conditions that nature can concoct. Death Valley can't kill cacti, but I can. Just remember this if you ever ask me to pet- or baby-sit.