work quirks

Let us, to quote that bloke Lewis Caroll, begin at the beginning. The alarm goes off. You drag yourself out of your glowing cocoon of a bed and brave the freezing, gloomy world outside. You shower, pump yourself full of caffeine and head off to the tube, where you spend the entire journey crushed into an elongated metal coffin, packed to the rafters with other equally miserable human beings. Then you get to work and are met with the prospect of spending the proceeding eight hours of your life staring into the empty void of a computer screen like a 21st century Narcissus.

Now, maybe I’m way off on this one, but the last thing I want to do when I arrive at this carpeted prison is confirm the dire circumstances of my situation by greeting everyone in the place with a cheery address. Yet everyone feels the need to wish a ‘Good Morning’ to everyone else upon beginning their daily incarceration. It is a need almost based in compulsion, as you seem to run the risk of spending the remainder of the day totally devoid of all human contact if you fail to utter this initial greeting. Regardless of the fact that you’ve probably only spent a maximum of fifteen hours apart from your beloved colleagues, office etiquette dictates that you have to go through this same rigmarole each and every morning before you can re-establish communications with them. I’m not saying that the process of wishing people a ‘Good Morning’ every day is particularly taxing, but surely it’s come to something when people refuse to acknowledge your existence without it. I’ll give you an example.

The other day, I arrived at work in my usual fashion (i.e. pissed-off and hung-over) and plonked myself down at my desk. There are six people who work in my immediate area, but at ridiculous o’clock only the girl that sits diagonally opposite to me was present. A pleasant girl, we usually exchange some form of verbal exchange at the start of the day. However, this particular morning, she had her head down studying a text with what seemed to be a relative intensity. My mental process was as follows: she looks like she’s busy, plus I feel like my head’s been raped by Zinedine Zidane, ergo I’ll forego the morning pleasantries. I must have sat there for the better part of half an hour before I was startled from my delirious haze to discover that she was looking over at me, her eyebrows raised in expectation of an answer. ‘I’m sorry?’ I grumbled. ‘Good morning’ she said…Good. Fucking. Morning. Seriously? Is there really any need to say that after I’d been there for thirty minutes? For god’s sake woman, I sit less than 2 metres from you! Unless you have the depth perception of Gordon Brown, there’s no way you missed me being there all this time! But this, it seems, is one of the many ridiculously pointless things you have to do in an office.

So, then it’s off to make the first cup of what inevitably turns out to be an unhealthy amount of coffee. I happen to sit quite close to the kitchen area of my office and thus, determined to avoid the unbelievably awkward small-talk that occurs in such areas, I usually wait until the coffee making area is totally devoid of human activity before I make my move for the caffeine. Nevertheless sometimes, whether because I’m still drunk to the point where my perception isn’t functioning, or because of some sodding colleague that generates the noise levels of a tit mouse, I get stuck in the kitchen area with a fellow human being. And then it’s too late. You can’t turn around and walk out. They’ve seen you. You are trapped.

So you return the awkward smile and try to go about preparing your coffee without making a fuss. You’ve retrieved your favourite mug from the cupboard (the one with Garfield lying in a hammock. Brilliant.) and you’re deliberately spooning in the coffee granules at a snail’s pace because the other person is standing right in front of the kettle, and…'How’s it going?’ Damn! So close. You almost made it out of there with some level of decorum, but now you’re going to have to exit the kitchen doing that awkward crouching side-step walk, like a crab wearing a too many hats. The reason? Because there is no naturalistic way to end one of these kitchen conversations. More often than not it’s someone you don’t know particularly well, because the people you work with are sitting at their desks, waiting for you to bring them their coffee like some cotton field-owning taskmaster (discussed below). No, it’s usually some random guy from Accounts who’s been hanging around there all morning so he can tell everyone that walks in that he’s off to Cuba next week. The conversation always follows the same pattern: You reply with the usual ‘Fine thanks. Yourself?’ Then the person that instigated the conversation says their fine and then launches into the topic that they wanted to talk about in the first place; the whole reason for their simulated interest in your wellbeing.

Everyone does it. Every single person thinks about themselves more than anything else in the world. But no one wants to admit that they do. So they disguise it. More often than not, it doesn’t vary much from the usual set up of a seemingly innocuous question designed to be reciprocated in order that the designated topic comes up. We’ve all done it. We’ve got something seriously cool planned to do on Saturday so it’s ‘Got anything planned for the weekend?’ They tell you that they might just chill out, go to the pub with some mates etc. And all the while you’re bursting with anticipation. Simultaneously excited by the prospect and anxious that you might blow your prepared explanation. The one that you’ve designed to drip in casualness, like a denim dressing-gown. The one which you’ve been practicing in your head ever since you found out about Saturday. Sometimes the gap between their answer and the polite reciprocation is unbearably long. A chasm of shattered hopes. You begin to crumble in the shadow of this potential ennui. But then it happens: ‘What about you?’ Finally. ‘Oh, I’m just going sky diving with Daniel Craig’.

Anyway, back to the kitchen. ‘Cuba eh? Wow. Sounds awesome. Really? 32 degrees? Huh. No. No, I’ve never been. Always wanted to though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeeeaaaahhhh. Right. Well, have a good time. See you when you get back. We’ll still be here. Haw haw haw.’ Then it’s time for the crab walk; You don’t know if they’ve finished boring you with their crap chat. You’ve tried to tie the conversation up nicely with that little accessible gag. All you want to do is get the hell out of there with your coffee, but you can’t look like all you want to do is get the hell out of there with your coffee. So you do the crab walk. It starts off slow; a kind of half-turn shuffle, all the while grinning inanely, just to demonstrate how much you enjoyed your conversation. Eventually this transforms into a forced canter about as natural as sarin nerve gas, which you retain all the way back to your desk. Sometimes they haven’t finished telling you about Cuba, and you have to stop half way through your turn and look like you weren’t about to go. Now that’s awkward.

Another perceived rule regarding coffee production is never EVER make one without asking everyone else in the building whether they’d like one first. This one took me a fair old time to get a grip of. For the first few days at my current job, every time I came back to my desk with a fresh cup of coffee, I was welcomed with some decidedly frosty glares from my colleagues. The sort of look you might give someone if they’d just told you that they laughed their head off all the way through Shindler’s List. Disapprovingly, I suppose. I don’t actually have too much of a problem with this one. It’s simple common courtesy. However, there are some people that never offer to go to the kitchen. They tend to be in the more senior positions and consequently feel it beneath them to do something for you. They worked hard so they don’t have to make the coffee any more. Those days are behind them. I’m not sure I agree with this mentality, and personally deem it to be in the same league as drinking your way through everybody else’s round at the pub, before farting loudly and walking out the door.

Right, that’s lunch.