There is a thin veneer of niceness in the office, and it is all that stands between workplaces continuing to function and chaos breaking out. Just once in a while you get to see the cracks. The pretence that everyone gets along is fed by management speak of the ‘team’, back-slapping, exchanges of gifts (usually cake), nights in the pub where you get drunk together and find common ground, and the office characters who just lift everyone’s mood so much. This isn’t where I work now. It’s practically everywhere I have ever worked. Work forces you together with what may be a large group of people, it’s luck if you actually like any of them, not surprising that you find many of them objectionable, and a testament to everyone’s restraint, instinct for survival and ability to bullshit that people aren’t smacking the life out of each other, hurling chairs across the room or at least walking off and doing something they’d actually like to do a lot more often.
It’s just like normal life except you’re locked in an air-conditioned office with a bunch of strangers for several hours a day, people asking stupid questions, sending stupid emails, not doing what they say they will, and you’re essentially paid to shut up and deal with it. People who open their mouth too much, say too much, question others too much, are a threat to the delicate balance of the office ecosystem, unreasonable, and tend to get moved along. Many in management are in that position because the one thing they have consistently failed to do during their time in an organisation is challenge the status quo or upset too many people, staying where they are and simply ending up in that position through no fault of their own, washed up by the tide. The post turtle is a great analogy for many (though fortunately not all) in management – you see a fence post with a turtle on the top, on its back, legs waving in the air. You’ve no idea how it got there, it certainly didn’t get there by itself, it doesn’t belong there, you wonder what idiot put it up there and you just want to gently help it down before it hurts itself.
Seeing hundreds of people pour through the station and out onto the streets this morning, as most other mornings, I’m doing my best to guess what everyone will do all day. Many will waste their time doing nothing much or waiting for someone else to do something before they can do the thing they’re supposed to be doing – you know, playing email tennis – reply to all, ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d get back to me on this as soon as convenient’. I’ve had this idea in mind for a while now that offices are essentially giant creches for adults, it gives people somewhere to go during the day, and what they get in return for turning up is money they can spend on things on the way home.
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
Ellen Goodman
The fact is that at work you need to get along with people so they do things for you. I have encountered people in the past who I found patently unpleasant, and it was extremely difficult to get anywhere with them – or they likewise thought I was a shit because they couldn’t get what they wanted from me. Matters have been escalated to management which is really just one child approaching a parent because their sibling won’t share something. People like to say that it’s not personal, but at work it’s just as personal as anywhere else, you just wrap up ‘I don’t like you and you’re not doing your job’ in phrases like ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d get back to me on this as soon as convenient’.
I’ll never tire of laughing at the people who refuse to believe we are descended from apes. Only one aspect of their monumental self-delusion is that they refuse to believe this, but it’s possibly the funniest aspect. Looking around at people, it’s hard not to believe that we’re descended from apes. All of the niceties, the veneer of civilisation, the fashion and the aftershave and the TV and the celebrity chefs, the buses and the trains and the iPods and the laptops, the coffee shops and the skyscrapers and Christmas, the meetings and the PowerPoint presentations and Gantt charts and the deliverables. We’re just shaved monkeys, and it makes life so much more interesting to remember that.
So what do you do to survive? BJ Cunningham, the man who created ‘Death’ brand cigarettes, an entrepreneur with a good sense of humour and a passion for what he does, was a recent speaker at a staff event, and the second business guru after Steve Jobs I have heard give the same advice. You have to love your job. If you can’t change anything about your own behaviour or outlook to make this happen, you change your job, and you keep changing until you get it right. If you can’t change your job, you go along with it. Go along with it for long enough and you could end up in management. Or you can be a cynical old fecker and blog about your fascination with the shaved monkeys around you like me, all the while making your evil evil plans for world domination. Tomorrow.
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Ghana 180- Cloud poo poo land February 1 2012
