Recarpeting
The soulless cube farm where I work had really cheap thin carpet in it when I started working for my corporate masters. Sometime during the summer the building got wet, and when it dried it shrunk, which meant that the carpet started wrinkling up to the point where people started to trip on it. Now, the Evil Party hasn't been in power long enough to make liability lawsuits illegal yet, so my corporate masters found themselves in a situation where they pretty much had to replace the carpets (I suspect they would have, anyway; they seem to be pretty good on the corporate master front (by 1999 standards, that is; I've worked for companies since 2000 which, um, don't give nearly as much of a damn as these people do) or get sued when someone tripped and broke their neck. So, this week, they came through, hoisted all of the cubicles up into the air, ripped out the old carpet, plunked down new carpet, and dropped the cubicles back onto the floor.
So I go into work this morning (after working from home yesterday because they were doing the cubes next to mine on tuesday night, and it was already pretty foul in the area from the smell of the nasty glue they use), unpacked my computer from the plastic bags someone had put it in, and tried to do some work. It took about a hour before the smell of the solvent wafting up from my feet reached the point where my head was about to explode (for non-political reasons! Imagine that!) and I had to bolt for home, where (thankfully), the stupid cable modem wasn't being overrun by viruses and I could work for a change.
I don't know what the screaming baby quotient will do to my work habits today, but I'm sure I'll find out.