When I was in college I co-oped for a biomedical startup that would totally have given me a job if they hadn't gotten eaten by a larger firm for their intellectual property, chopped up for parts and shipped back to Minnesota.

Some of those pieces landed in another biomedical startup, that offered me a "job." Unfortunately they were a cash-poor startup so for three months I was an "engineering technician" rather than an "engineer" despite being one of two people in the entire department with a degree.

They had nowhere to put me, and no money to build me anything, so they pointed me at a pile of cubicle parts and told me to build my own. The four walls were different colors and half of the desk was held up by books.

The finance manager - of course it was the finance manager - came through my Island of Misfit Toys cubicle with a tape measure and discovered that it measured 9'x6'. This could not do, of course, because the "standard" cubicle size for people who weren't managers was 8x6.

He did not order the parts to make a 7x6 cubicle. That would have been fiscally imprudent (never mind that I'd saved them $180k that week by reconfiguring the warehouse). The prudent thing, according to him, was to order the parts to convert my 9x6 cubicle into three 3x6 carrels.

So I put his carrels together. And then I ran 200' of CAT5 cable under the carpet back to the machine shop that nobody knew how to use (they literally outfitted a $200k shop without hiring any machinists) and put my computer there.

Whenever I heard anyone coming down the hall I'd fire up the chinese-ripoff Bridgeport and make shavings.

God damn was that a shitty job.