the office

After an almost week-long absence, my annoying cubemate is back in full force. It seems even worse this morning because I think I lost some of the tolerance I had built up for her while she was gone. It feels like rolling around in the snow naked after being in a hot tub as opposed to simply rolling around in the snow naked.

The problem is that she talks on the phone ALL DAY - she literally picks up the phone and dials someone before she sits down in the morning. She doesn’t get coffee or turn her computer on first, she is on that phone like it is crack and she is a crack addict. A crack addict who also loves talking on the phone.

Mostly, when she is not on the phone treating her fiancé like he is a toddler incapable of the simplest tasks or understanding of the most basic emotions, she is talking to her girlfriends about how fuuuuun things are and how cooooool and aweeeesoooooome things sound. She is also getting married soon, and the incessant wedding talk somehow permeates even my loudest and most rocking iPod defensive strategies.

Her second favorite topic, aside from the minutiae of her lame Valentine’s Day wedding, is how much work she has to do. It makes me wonder how much she could theoretically get done if she, I don’t know, hung up and worked on a project or two. We may perhaps never know.

And it isn’t just me that’s bothered. The only other two people in her vicinity have already written me emails this morning with similarly hopeless-yet-caustic comments about the deterioration of the quality of our workspaces.

This morning in particular, I am overwhelmed with an idea I had in which I would spend the whole day on the phone myself, not hanging up between calls but merely tapping the receiver in between dials. I would talk to everyone I knew, telling them how much fuuuuuuun I was having and how aweeeeeesome and cooooool and niiiiiiiice their weekend plans sounded. I would hold the mirror up to her face, and she could partake of her ugly, ceaselessly chatty reflection!

The calls would get more and more obviously annoying, as I said things like, “Ohmygawd I just have so much work to do - sometimes it feels as if I don’t even work at work, but merely regurgitate the cloying details of my 30-something social life! Details that often only consist of drinking a responsible amount of white wine and being nitpicky about my fiancé!”

Or, when I started feeling especially evil, ”You know what’s a really interesting topic to talk about exhaustively? My cubemate’s totally clichéd Valentine’s Day wedding! Let me tell you more about the flower-ordering process in such a drawn-out manner that you will get nauseous the next time you even smell flowers.”

And I would go on and on, all day, until my cubemate got the message that maybe - just maybe - it was neither aweeeeeeesome or cooooooooool to ruin everyone else’s work environment.

Or maybe I should just get some work done. Talk to you laaaaaaaaaaater, sweeeetie!

Right now I’m writing you from a storage room. Every time I try to shift my legs, I hit a bunch of boxes. Every now and again, someone from my office will pop in without knocking (because why would a person be working in a storage room?) to get some packing materials or look around for an old edition.

It’s kind of like the scene from Office Space where the Milton character is moved to the basement with only his precious red stapler to keep him company. Except I don’t have any kind of stapler and this isn’t a wildly over-the-top comedy about corporate life. It’s my life.

The whole thing started about a week ago when I was told that due to a cubicle expansion going on along my wall, my cube would have to shift four feet to the left. It didn’t sounds like a big deal. Well, it kind of was. First off, I had to pack everything in my office (things I need on a daily basis). Then a bunch of other stuff went wrong and here I am, many nomadic days later, nestled among packing peanuts and office supplies. I probably won’t get the smell of cardboard off me for a week.

I was hugely upset about this yesterday. Not only was the “reorganization” going badly and slowly, but, being a lowly marketing assistant, I was not informed of anything or apologized to by anyone. I got my best information from rumors and gossip and the strange men with tape measures instead of from my office managers. Not to mention that the rest of the people affected by the change who were not marketing assistants were told to work from home, where they’d be more comfortable. I sincerely hope none of them live in storage facilities.

I very, very badly wanted to yell at someone about this. Instead, I seethed about it all day and then went home and cried and felt bad for myself. No one appreciates me! I’m being stored!

Then I talked to my Dad on the phone and to Ben. They both had about the same advice: snap out of it. Pick your fights. It’s just work. Don’t let the small stuff bother you. Don’t throw a pity party.

It was all good advice. The problem isn’t (I pray to god) long term - I should be back in my office by the end of the week. Pitying myself and being angry isn’t going to help anything either. More importantly, my job isn’t something that I’m passionate about, and I should be comfortable with that. My job is something that I do during the day that funds the things I am passionate about outside of work. I went to the gym (which always, always makes me feel better), cleared my mind, read a book, and decided not to be bothered by the situation any longer.

This morning, I came in, laughed at my storage room, and fixed a couple of boxes so that I could prop my feet up. When the office manager arrived (to her comfy, furnished, normal office), I talked to her about my concerns, told her that they should communicate better with me in the future, and promptly moved on with my life.

Especially now, with my company making big changes during a merge, and when my job will drastically change for the worse come January, I need to concentrate on what’s actually important to me and my career. I’ll make a big fuss when a big fuss needs to be made and throw a pity party when pity is actually invited and ready to attend. Until then, you know where to find me. I’m the one popping bubble wrap on company time.

I have trouble finding the right way to have conversations about books. Book clubs usually bother me. And while getting my MFA, the three required 500-level literature seminars I took probably rank among the least favorite and most useless hours of my entire life. Literature classes are too much about showing off, about making other people in the class feel bad, about assuming that the author and his work fit perfectly into certain genres, time periods, and trends. Literature classes too often assume that any book read in a literature class is perfect and that the author knew exactly what he or she was doing with every single word. Not to mention that literature classes are usually way too serious and seriously boring.

On the other hand, book clubs suffer from different but equally bad problems. Too often the discussion disintegrates into emotional reactions - like which characters we liked or didn’t like, as if these characters really existed. Too often after that, the conversation too quickly deteriorates into talking about boys or shoes. Usually, these book clubs take place in quaintly quirky coffee houses with mismatched chairs, $5 espressos, and music that is just a little cooler than the music you listen to. Without exception, these coffeehouses have punny names like “The Daily Grind” or “Not Your Average Joe” or “See You Latte.”

So, you can imagine my horror yesterday, walking to a tea house called “Subtle Tea” to meet with my work-related book club for the first time. As I walked into the place, esoteric trip-hop music on the stereo (which was a just little cooler than my music ) and Mac laptops covering every flat surface (way, way cooler than my Mac laptop), my hopes were not high. Even though I wanted to talk about the book, I wasn’t sure I was ready to be disappointed again. You might even say I was filled with a deep Apa Tea.

But what followed, to my delight, was a pretty intelligent and fun discussion of the book we read (it was Marisha Pessl’s “Special Topics in Calamity Physics - you can read my review here). No one got interrupted, no one talked too much, no one said “semiotic” or “paradigm” or “post post modern.” Someone brought chocolate.  

It reminded me that, even though most organized book-talking sessions go wrong somehow, getting to talk about what you’re reading with a diverse group of people is something to work toward, even if it means sitting within earshot of a hipster knitting circle discussing skinny jeans. Not only do you get to ask questions and hear about totally different and interesting readings of the book, but I also find myself reading the book more closely before the discussion and getting more out of it. The whole thing filled me with hope and got me totally excited about next month’s book, Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

After the meeting, I met my friend Amanda and we got talking about books, too - a new short story writer she’s discovered, her first experience with Dos Passos. And when I got home, I talked with Ben about the short story I read on the train that he had recommended. Here I was thinking that I never get to talk about books, when really I spent the whole night doing it with one person or another, in one way or another.

My friends, I suppose, make up a more loose-knit un-official book club - we often borrow and lend books to each other, argue over this or that author, talk about this or that review or trend. And I think that’s just as rewarding and just as important. I supposed the only difference is that our book club meets in bars. Bars with more straightforward names like “Cheap Shots” and “Why Not?”

Either way, I’m glad I now have both venues.

Once a month, my company sends out mass emails alerting professors about new texts in their fields. Part of my job is answering anyone who writes back with requests, questions, and concerns. Usually I can expect to reply to a few hundred emails in the days following a mailing. And while 99% of these emails are from considerate, helpful, understanding professors (who get helpful, considerate, understanding replies from me), every once and again someone is just plain mean.

This one, which I received today, concerned a professor whose name accidentally had a note written next to it in the email we sent him (Move To Hum means move to the humanities mailing list):

You can’t really believe that my name is “Professor Smith Move To Hum,” can you? If you want my response, address me correctly. TS

It was the afternoon, and I was probably on email 200 for the day. Why did this guy have to be so mean? Did he know a real person answered these emails, a real person who didn’t deserve such condescending treatment? As usual when I receive emails like this, I write a mean response back, erase it, and then write an overly-polite, cowering apologetic email that I begrudgingly send. But this time I sent the first one:

Hi Professor Smith Move to Hum

Sorry for the mix-up… as you might guess, this is a computer-generated email list. However, the data comes from somewhere and that somewhere is ME - a hardworking woman with a useless graduate degree who has a pretty sad and monotonous data-entry job. And, as a person who answers hundreds of these emails a day even though she wishes for better things in life, please give me a break when something goes a little wrong - at least be nice when alerting me to a problem. Or do you not ever make mistakes?

Anyway, I’m guessing from the note on your files that you’re a humanities professor and not a history professor. If that’s the case let me know and I’ll move you to the correct mailing list and, who knows, I might even correct your name.

After I pressed SEND I quietly waited to be fired. But nothing happened except that the guy (his name has been changed, of course) wrote back a few hours later.

I apologize. Thanks for your reply. Please keep me on the history list. TS

Then I guess I felt a little bad, too. Maybe I had caught in a bad moment or during a bad day. Maybe he, too, was in the middle of a thankless task that made him cranky. On the other hand, maybe he simply never really thought about how customer service people might want to be treated as people, too. That they might need even more humanity than people who don’t answer spam emails on a regular basis for their paycheck.

It’s like people who yell at telemarketers - why would you do that? Do these angry, yelling people think that it was that specific person’s idea to call people up all day one after another and bother them? No. No one likes being a telemarketer. They’re just trying to get by. And if the best they can do is be a telemarketer, let’s be extra nice to them, because things have probably not been going their way.

Today was one of those days when I got my house keys out at the subway turnstile instead of my metro pass. When I got my metro pass out at my office entrance instead of my work ID. When, instead of getting my house keys out upon finally trudging up the steps to my home late in the afternoon, I teared up a little bit. Just because everything felt a little harder than usual all day long.

Today I jammed the printer and couldn’t fix it myself. I had to be the dumb office lady who calls the young guys in the mailroom wailing like an idiotic damsel in distress: “I don’t know where the paper could have possibly gotten jammed - I’ve opened all the little side doors and checked all of the normal jam sites but my tiny female birdbrain just couldn’t figure it out and I need to be rescued by someone who understands machines and logic. Someone with a penis.”

It was one of those days when, the night before, I made a thorough, detailed To-Do List that compartmentalized Monday’s responsibilities into three neat columns: Work Tasks, Writing Tasks, and Personal Tasks. And I left that detailed list at home, probably because “Take To-Do List to Work” was somehow left off of the list of Personal Tasks.

All day I tried to visualize the list, sitting next to where my satchel sits, thinking that, perhaps, if I squinted hard enough I’d be able to read it in my mind’s eye. Not having it was paralyzing and reading it when I got home was like looking to the answer key to a crossword I gave up on. Of course! Birth control subscription! Call parents! Think of something special, creative, and original for Ben’s birthday! I could have gotten it all done if only I had known!

It was one of those days when I was so convinced that my email client was broken that I - yes, pathetically - sent an email from my work account to my personal account, just to make sure it would go through.

It went through. In seconds. It said, “Hello? I care about you? - Sarah.” I deleted it.

Luckily, though, it was also one of those days when Ben opened the door when I got home, all warm sweatshirt and cool aftershave, suggesting that we go to the gym to get the stress out and then eat a whole-wheat pizza, drink some wine, and watch some Monday Night Football. And implying, through such statements, that we all have days like this and it’s okay to tell these days to screw themselves by running three miles, drinking wine, eating pizza, and watching football.

Don’t worry, though - I made sure to put my to-do list in my satchel before I took a too-hot shower, slipped on my one-size-bigger jeans, and sipped my first glass of wine. Because tomorrow I will conquer the world. It’s on my list.

I read a lot of stuff about how to get ahead at work, about how to be a team player or get promoted. And that’s all well and good if you’re in the field you want to be in and generally happy about what you do. But I want to put something out there more along the lines of How to Eke By or How to Barely Keep Receiving a Paycheck. You know, advice for the many, many people out there who have jobs that they aren’t happy with, jobs that are condescending, jobs that feel like sitting in waiting room for eight hours a day, hoping for something better.

In a lot of ways, I like my job. It pays the rent, it doesn’t tire me out, and I have a wonderful manager who understands me. But in a lot of other ways my job is slowly killing my soul. I waste time and energy on things I don’t care about, I sit on my ass in a box all day, and I get an unhealthy, warped idea of what money is supposed to mean to me.

Over the year or so that I’ve worked this office job, though, I think I’ve picked up on a lot of great ways to slide by. It’s a pretty complicated formula involving keeping your boss content, avoiding social contact, and being utterly invisible to middle management. It’s a delicate mixture of passive-aggression and gold old regular aggression.

Today’s advice concerns the Evil Administrative Assistant in my office. As you can tell, we don’t really get along and never have. He brings passive aggressiveness to heights that even I find frightening and is also a bit anal retentive. He tends to pick favorites and hold grudges. He’s my manger’s manager’s assistant, which, in his warped mind, makes him one rung higher on the ladder, even though we are both assistants, also known as Doers of Menial Tasks.

He orders around the marketing assistants and I often get emails from him asking me to tidy my office or tidy my mangers office or the tidy marketing supply rooms (I am organized but certainly not tidy). He’s one of those people who will “suggest” you do a certain list of things and then get angry if you don’t act on his “suggestions.” Then he’ll “suggest” you take his suggestions. And so on.

He’s also the guy who is charge of ordering office supplies and filling out technology forms for the group, and he takes these lame responsibilities very seriously — in a Dwight-like manner. I once went weeks without packing tape, perhaps because I didn’t want to small talk with him about musicals.

(Aside: EAA isn’t as bad as I’m making him out to be. He’s just someone in my office who tells me to do things, which I hate. To tell the truth, I’m not exactly a joy to work with either, as one might imagine. He’s really mostly a normal guy with good intentions. His biggest trespass is simply having to work with me.)

Now, my goals in this situation are to A) avoid speaking with the Evil Administrative Assistant face to face at all costs and B) avoid tidying anything, ever, and, even more importantly C) avoid being asked to tidy things, even if they are only suggestions.

So. A few weeks ago I devised a plan based on simple stimulus/response conditioning. Every time I needed EAA to complete a task for me (order boxes, fill out a report, sign something) I held onto it, waiting patiently. Then, as soon as I received a ridiculous request from EAA to tidy something (or not wear ripped jeans or to be civil to the new person “for at least a week”), I would immediately barrage him with all of my saved up requests at once - just like ringing a little bell.

It’s really as simple as making a dog drool: I connected in EAA’s mind emailing a task to me with his having to do several tasks for me. I do the same thing to him when he drops by my cube with “suggestions.” He’ll suggest that I look for a new place to keep my supplements and I jump on him with a suggestion to clean out the marketing closet around the corner. It’s Psychology 101, and this time I’m not cutting to play video games.

Sure, I’m using punishment as a conditioning behavior instead of reward, which we learned in Psych 101 was a bad way to condition children. But this guy isn’t a child, he’s a gown (evil) man. And, dear reader, I haven’t had to tidy anything in weeks. Let’s just hope I don’t run out of packing tape.

Ben and I worked hard this week - even harder than usual. We’re both working on multiple writing projects four or fives hours a day, we are working full-time jobs, and we are cooking well-balanced meals consisting of lean proteins, greens and whole grains each night. We go to the gym each afternoon, systematically exercising our muscle groups while simultaneously building our cardio (watch out, Brit!). Before we fall into an exhaustive sleep each night, we read various tomes of literature and think complex thoughts about them.

By Thursday afternoon, we were both suffering from soreness, eyestrain, and, most importantly, a sharp, gnawing hunger for fatty protein and partial grains. Morale was low and lactic acid levels were high. It was time to switch gears from work hard to play hard.

I emailed my manager and asked her if I could call in sick on Friday. She said yes and jokingly told me to feel better, further cementing in my mind that she is the most understanding and utterly amazing person in the entire corporate world (at times it almost pains me that she gives me no reason to complain about her). I was free and Thursday night was mine for the taking.

When I got home from work, a bit early, Ben and I tried to wait for dinner time, but after about five minutes of sitting quietly on the couch and both privately thinking about shrimp, we decided that it would be less crowded if we left immediately and ate shrimp as soon as possible.

The experience was everything I could have hoped for. Not only was my meal paid for due to a lost football bet a few weeks before, but the waitress was determined to get us as many shrimp as she could find. If you don’t believe me you should know that after we ordered our endless shrimp entrees but before our meals came, our waitress stopped by our table as we were munching on those awesome cheesy biscuits and drinking delicious brewdogs.

She asked, “Would you like to order more shrimp?”

We looked down at our shrimpless bread saucers confused.

“If you order more shrimp before your meals come, you won’t have any downtime between servings.”

Yes, wonderful Red Lobster waitress, we would like more theoretical shrimp in the future, even before we have tasted the first of our Round One shrimp. Thank you.

In the end, though, the shrimp won. We both put in a strong showing and destroyed many shrimp, but there are many, many left in the world, to be eaten on other nights.

After our delicious meal, we drank a brewdog while playing Big Buck Hunter at our local café/bar/arcade (I won). After that, we played Madden (Ben won) and watched the Colbert Report and drank a brewdog. In short, we played hard.

This morning I got to read in bed and stay in my jammies and eat cereal and watch the Lifetime Movie Network. And then we got back to work.

Read another entry about The Lobster.