OIC. Ruddy heck. You really
were only referring to "cubicles" then!?
How disappointing!
Just shows how one's imagination can lead one astray when one starts looking for an assumed hidden meaning that might not actually
be there in the first place.
I saw the cube/cubicle bit, but that seemed a kinda obvious and awkward pun, so I dismissed the idea that you were referring to
that and I instead then focused on finding any obscured/hidden messages in the picture. (Oh good! A puzzle!)
The most obvious were the repetitive words displayed on a slant -
"motion elements" - accompanied by the little cube/square symbols, visible
through the ice blocks. What the heck were they? They were all quite unfamiliar to me. What did they refer to? Was the
slant relevant?
That all completely threw me. I just
couldn't see the relevance or hidden meaning/significance in/of
that. I was doing duckgo searches that came up with stuff that made matters worse and I started to think it was all very ambiguous and subtle.
So, in the end, I presumed that it must have been just
too subtle for me to "get" because it was probably alluding to some important and peculiar American IT corporate-cultural cross-reference which I was ignorant of (had not come across before) - 'cos you had wrote "...
when they moved us from 2 man offices to the cubicles..." and I thought
that could have thus been referring to something that immediately
pre-dated office cubicles in the US and that was beyond my ken (I saw nothing special/unusual in 2-man offices). So I just
couldn't see the hidden meaning which I had imagined had to be there. I resigned myself to the fact that, obviously, I just "couldn't keep up" with the joke you were making.
Good job I don't take myself too seriously. I usually find my mistakes quite amusing, and educational - after I have finished kicking myself for going down the wrong path.
I was thinking about this - how one's mind can confuse itself - when I was helping my daughter with her "computer science" studies homework tonight. She's writing her first computer program - it's in Python 3, with which I was not familiar.
I was having to learn the rules and syntax by implication, as she didn't have a reference manual and was just using an online Python code editor/interpreter on a trial-and-error basis. So it was edit, run, stop on error. It would spit out the errors progressively, incrementally and individually (one at a time), stopping at each error and waiting for you to correct that (edit) before it moved on to the next error (run again from the beginning), and so on. Painfully tedious and confusing, but potentially instructive
if one understood the need to to focus on being pedantic and trying to understand the
hidden/implicit logic (grammar) of the language being parsed.
Though I learned from
@cranioscopical's comment (above) that Vance Packard was perobably to blame for the invention of the office cubicle concept, I still don't know what the
"motion elements" and the accompanying little symbols were referring to, in the picture.
