Tag Archives: coworker

Relief…

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When someone is sick, most people feel some kind of empathy. That’s the human response. The slightly more jaded response, though, is giving a brief moment of thanks to God that the person in question is not going to be in the office today. As badly as I feel about someone being ill or suffering, that’s nothing compared to the overwhelming relief I feel at not having to deal with them for two days in a row. That’s probably more than a little wrong. It’s possibly evil. It does, however, have the virtue of being exactly how I feel about the issue. I may be a lot of things, but dishonest isn’t one of them.

Sure, if it were something life threatening I’d probably feel bad about the situation, but if someone having a head cold can give me a few moments of peace, there’s no harm in being happy about that, right?

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Firewall…

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I’m very careful to keep a mighty firewall between my professional self and every other aspect of my life. Having either one bleeding over into the other is just not something I even want to contemplate dealing with. Today I’m reminded why. It seems one of my colleagues is having a baby… and that has led to an unending round of sonogram showing and appreciative cooing from the female members of the staff. It’s also let to merciless ribbing that it wasn’t the sought after son he had predicted. When I say unending, I mean that. It’s been going on now for three hours more or less non-stop. Fortunately, this poor soul apparently has a longer fuse than I do. Maybe it’s just me, but the squealing, shrieking girl thing just doesn’t play when it’s coming from a room of 30 and 40-somethings. Once is endearing. Doing it each time anyone who hasn’t yet been informed comes into the office makes you seem slightly insane.

It’s possible that I’m the oddball here, but most of my coworkers really know next to nothing about me other than that I come in on time, leave on time, get my work done, and generally keep a neat and tidy desk. That’s really all they need to know. They don’t really know if I’m married. Don’t know if I have kids. I don’t give away weekend or holiday plans other than letting one or two people know that I’ll be out of town or otherwise unreachable. For the most part the reverse is also true. I make every effort not to drag work issues home with me. No one at home needs to know the details of what’s going on at the office any more than the guy at the desk next to me needs to know if I enjoy collecting wedding cake toppers and visiting small New England bed and breakfasts.

Call me crazy, but there are aspects (i.e. most parts) of my life I just don’t feel compelled to share… and yes, the irony of saying that on a blog is not completely lost on me.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Snapped…

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I’ve had my fill of waging war against overbearing bosses and know-it-all colleagues. I do my best these days to keep my head down and avoid notice whenever possible. I don’t want to stand out or fall behind. I want to hide right in the middle of the curve. I’ve said it before, but I really just wan to do the job and get home as quickly as possible at the end of the day.

I’ve always had a temper, but was blessed with an incredibly long fuse. Because of that, most people have never seen me detonate. At most, they find me at a simmer or more rarely moving on towards a rolling boil. For the sake of professional decorum and not wanting to give away that someone’s actually gotten under my skin, I try very hard to keep it from boiling over. Once I’ve reached the point of no return, one of two things are going to happen. I’m going to slam something down on the desk and storm out of the room or more likely I’m going to get very quiet, set my jaw, and hiss something at you through clenched teeth.

It seems that I’ve finally reached that snapping point with someone, who yesterday cornered me at my desk to tell me their family stories of long, lingering deaths. I have no earthly idea why anyone would consider this appropriate office conversation, or really appropriate for anyone other than family and the closest of friends. After 30 minutes of aural abuse, I finally snapped; not so much because today was particularly troubling, but because it’s been the same thing for months now.

Hey, we all have our own personal cross to bear. Yours don’t make you any more special, troubled, or saintly than anyone else around here. Apparently telling someone that to their face is considered impolite. The up side is they haven’t said anything to me in two days. On balance, being thought impolite is a small price to pay for that kind of peace and quiet.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date

There’s a difference between being friends and being friendly…

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I like the people I work with well enough. By that I mean I don’t generally want to fold, spindle, or mutilate them by the end of the day. After some of the colleagues I’ve had in the past, I consider that a win. We spend eight hours a day with each other and for the most part manage to stay remarkably friendly with one another. That’s where the problem seems to start.

I’m perfectly willing to be friendly with everyone in the office, but I’m not particular interested in being their friend. I don’t want to come over to their homes for dinner. I don’t particularly want to hang out with them in any setting that’s something other than the office. They’re nice enough people mostly, but I’ve got my own friends already thanks. Adding them to the mix seems to blur the line a little too much between business and personal lives and I’m not cool with that at all. Maybe I’m the deviant in the group, but I’m just not interested in hanging out with my boss or the guy I spend 40-hours a week sitting next to. I see enough of them already.

I completely understand that the manager’s handbook says we have to do team building activities, but since it’s building the work team, how about we do it on work time, huh? Picking a random Wednesday and buying pizza for everyone would have been way better for my morale than royally jacking up one of the two days a week I actually get away from the office. Since I don’t detect any malicious intent here, I’m writing this one off as a strong concept hobbled by poor execution… but let’s try not to make the same mistake again.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Long-term storage…

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The risk in throwing things away is that you’ll wake up one morning and realize you just tossed out something you now need. In the vast majority of cases, this moment never happens and we go on with our lives with a little less crap laying around junking the place up. Some people have a harder time than others letting things go… or even just accepting that even though it’s something they very clearly remember doing that was important once upon a time, no one is ever going to need it again.

I can’t stress with enough conviction that we will never, under any conceivable circumstance, need to retrieve the office document archive from 1985. After 26 years, it’s probably safe to assume that those days when you were the young buck are well astern and you should probably just let them go instead of insisting that we hold them in our very small storage room “indefinitely.” Those boxes are more likely to fall over on some poor unsuspecting intern and kill them than they are to contain anything that anyone in the office might actually find useful.

I hate to have to be the one to bring this up, but you’re already the person in the office who keeps too many plants and too much trade show swag in your area. I’d consider it a massive personal favor if we could try to avoid you ending up on the pilot episode of Hoarders: Cubicle Farm Edition. So please, dear colleague, let it go.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Delicate sensibilities…

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As alleged professionals, we all have basic responsibilities beyond those things described in our job descriptions. If your job description provides a laundry list of explicit tasks, our status as professionals imparts a second list of implied tasks that we need to carry out in order to accomplish our primary role. One of those implied tasks, at least in my mind, is reading and understanding the information put in front of us.

Part of my job, from time to time, is preparing electronic correspondence for senior leaders to inform them about upcoming meetings, key decisions made at high echelons, or to provide general information about the health of their organization. I generally write those messages as if our leaders aren’t mouth-breathing oxygen thieves. According to the self-anointed gatekeeper of such correspondence, my assumption is incorrect.

Apparently, selecting “forward” on the email task bar and referring them to the appropriate section of the message will lead to catastrophic confusion in the executive suite. These are important people and expecting them to use the little track wheel on their Blackberry to scroll down is too presumptuous. I’m told that our leaders can’t be troubled to read more than two or three sentences in an email, so it’s critical that all salient facts be presented in the viewable space when they first open a message. Thanks to my colleague, I now know that our leaders are too busy to read or contemplate any message involving the slightest hint of complexity.

Call me difficult, but when the topic has been perfectly well summarized by someone already, I don’t see any value to taking 30 minutes to reword it based on the argument that the big words might confuse our leaders or that having a message forwarded might offend their delicate sensibilities. Despite my occasional arguments to the contrary, I don’t really think our leaders are that dumb and I certainly don’t think they are that delicate.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Yes, I’m new here…

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Look lady, I get it. I’m new and that’s probably as much of a pain in the ass for you as it is for me. Sorry that I haven’t been here for 38 1/2 years, but there are things that you know that I need to know. I’m going to occasionally ask you a question about who to talk to or what something does. What I’m going to need you to do is not answer every question by rolling your eyes and making a giant production out of bringing me up to speed.

You see, some day, you are going to drop dead and someone, most likely me, is going to have to figure out what you have been up to and it’s going to be easier to do that if you’re just up front with me from the outset. Otherwise, once you’re gone I’ll have to go through your files, not find what I’m looking for, and then make my bones by telling everyone how jacked up all your stuff is. So, you see, cooperating with me now really saves us both a lot of trouble.

Oh, and one more thing… There’s a pretty good chance that I’m not going to do things the exact same way you do them. Different is ok as long as we get to the same answer. Despite your best efforts to convince me that things only work when your desk is piled high with paper copies of everything you’re working on or have worked on in the past six months, I’m ok keeping my desk clear and my files electronic. I promise when I need a hardcopy of something I’ll be able to find a printer all by myself.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Dedication…

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One of the people I work with loves her job. I’m making that assumption anyway because most days she seems to always stick around until 6:00 or 7:00 when end-of-tour is closer to 4:30. According to her, there’s always something “hot” that comes up after the rest of us pull up stakes for the day that needs done and just can’t wait for the next morning. I suppose it’s theoretically possible that this is true, but based on my own observation of daily workload around here, I’m somewhat skeptical.

I guess someone might look at her and think the late hours were a sign of dedication. The fact is, though, we’re not a life-or-death operation. It’s probably not politic to say in a world of 9.2% unemployment and a collapsing stock market, but sometimes a job is just a job. As much as an escort sells her body for cold hard cash, I whore out my big beautiful brain for the same consideration. Maybe some people do it for the love, but me, I do it for money. I do it so I can afford to pay the bills, eat nice meals, and occasionally travel to new and interesting places. I don’t do it out of a misplaced sense of loyalty as I’m quite certain the powers that be would have no qualms about throwing me over the gunwale during a reduction in force.

Sure, there was a time when I was young and idealistic and my sense of self derived directly from my position title and placement on the org chart. I got a little older and a little more jaded and discovered that no matter how cushy, the job is pretty much just a set of handcuffs keeping you from doing the things you really want to do because you’ve got bills to pay. And we should have bills to pay. We should have to work for our supper. But we shouldn’t be working instead of eating our supper.

I’m too old to be naïve about how the world works. Maybe sticking to the ol’ eight-and-out is committing slow career suicide. Missing the next rung on the career ladder still sounds like a better option than missing out on everything that isn’t work. The only shame is it took me so long to figure that out.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date

Nervous condition…

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I’ve slowly come to identify a condition in one of my new colleagues. Apparently when working on short timelines or under stress, this individual’s default setting is “talk, nonstop.” It doesn’t seem to make much difference that if one is on a demanding timeline usually that means we are all plugging away on our own similarly pressing issues. I’ve tried the usual “polite” responses of keeping my responses short, answering while continuing to peck away at the keyboard, not making eye contact, etc. Next we’ll be moving along to the less gentle “look, I’ve got a lot of work, let’s pick this up later” or the even more blatant listening to my iPod at my desk routine although that’s usually just me sitting at my desk with earbuds in not actually listening to anything. If that fails, it’s possible that I’ll have to bludgeon this person to death with a hole punch and hide the body in the “protected wetland” (aka swamp) behind the building.

I have no earthly idea what would give someone the impression that I’m a good listener and even less of an idea why they think anyone at all would care about the inane prattle that dribbles out of their filthy sewers. Let’s be honest, I’m here to do a job and get paid. If I want to talk about something that’s not work, I’ll call one of my actual friends. While I’m here, all I need you to do is STFU and let me do a day’s work, ok?

Awesome.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

The Big D…

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Attention Colleagues:

Open bay cubicles are not the appropriate venue to discuss the ongoing drama of your divorce proceedings, the backbiting antagonism of your ex-husband, or details of the child support decree that you’ve decided to fight. As interested as the person you’re talking to might find this tragic tale of woe, the other 12 people sitting in the room aren’t nearly as interested. Well, technically, I suppose they are, but mostly because it’s grist for the lunchtime gossip mill.

I wouldn’t go so far as suggest that there is a firewall between your professional and personal life, but perhaps it would be wise to install some kind of filter on what you decide the entire office needs to know. Really, it’s as much for your own good as it is for ours.
Thanks for your kind attention in this matter.

Very respectfully yours,

Jeff

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date