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Perky Pat-Style Unemployment Layout
Well, unemployment in my home state of Michigan has gone past fifteen percent, the worst in the nation. People are now thinking with nostalgia about their earlier lives spent in comfortable cubcles, and the employment situation just isn't getting any better.
In his classic 1963 short story The Days of Perky Pat, Philip K. Dick wrote about people who were forced to live underground to avoid the radiation dust that rendered the surface uninhabitable. They longed for the good old days, when they lived in little box houses full of gadgets, surrounded by neat lawns and paved roads.
Everyone had a Perky Pat layout that they used to return to the good old days.
We lived then, Norm Schein said to himself, like Perky Pat and Leonard do now. This is how it actually was...
Playing this game... it's like being back there, back in the world before the war.
Nostalgic about your lost job? Thankfully, you can now purchase The Cubes, cubicle playsets.
Norman Schein gazed down at their combined layout, the swanky shops, the well-lit streets with the parked new-model cars, all of them shiny, the split-level house itself, where Perky Pat lived and where she entertained Leonard, her boy friend. It was the house that he perpetually yearned for; the house was the real focus of the layout - of all the Perky Pat layouts, however much they might otherwise differ...
(Read more about Dick's Perky Pat layouts)
(The Cube playset)
Bob, Joe, and Ted spend eight hours a day, five days a week, at tiny desks in tiny cubicles in a giant room packed with countless similar cubicles in a giant building filled with countless similar rooms.Bob, Ted, and Joe each come with one 2-3/4" posable plastic figure and all the necessary plastic parts to build a classic corporate cube: four walls, desk, chair, file cabinet, in/out box, phone, and computer. Comes with a sticker sheet of decor for your cube, complete with graphs, charts, screens for the computer and pithy office posters.
From ThinkGeek.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 7/27/2009)
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