Office people are interesting. Being from the service industry I never really appreciated the little quirks that make living and working inside of a concrete box that has no windows and was built sometime around the end of World War Two a little more bearable. A few of the things that I have noticed:
Fake plants. Not only are the plants here that are supposed to make the fact that we can’t see real plants from our desks fake, they aren’t even really in the shape of plants. Well, let me change that: they are in the rough shape of plants, but being that they are stickers on the institutionally white-ish walls, they are two dimensional representations of things like Bamboo (doesn’t really grow here) and palm trees (only grow here when the developer of a strip mall tries to spruce the place up (see what I did there?) and then the die pretty quickly due to the lack of sunshine that we troglodytic North Westerners live with on a daily basis.) and other plants which I can’t identify due to their being a generally unpleasant shade of dark green and perfectly flat. These are everywhere. They are on the walls between cubes. They are in the hallways. They are on little plastic inserts that have been placed over the aged and cracking florescent light covers so that it looks like you are looking at a nice blue sky, through dense tropical foliage at the little clouds that float lazily along the underside of the second floor of the building I work in. If they really wanted to make it like having windows they should just paint the lights with a semi-translucent grey paint, put a bunch of soggy, lichen-covered sticks on the ceiling, and turn the fire-sprinklers on to just the faintest of trickles. *edit: yes I know that that was one of the worst constructed sentences in the history of the world. Get over it.
Nerf Guns. God. Damn. Nerf. Guns. I mean don’t get me wrong, I like Nerf guns and have a small arsenal (read: Waco) of my own, but the idea that at any time I can be in the middle of doing something that I have ever done before, for which the fate of a grocery store’s ability to sell crap to people may or may not hang in the balance (dramatic music) and suddenly be pegged in the top of the head by a whistling, medium-density foam dart from across the room – probably from near one of the fake trees – kind of bugs me. It has the effect of throwing me off my mental track like a bad switch on the Burlington-Northern.
Trinkets. There are trinkets everywhere. People have all kinds of crap on their desks. I understand pictures of the wife and the kids and the dogs and the motorcycles and the cube you are sitting in and you and the motorcycles. What I don’t understand is the ability for every third cube to have a string of Christmas lights, a third of which are burned out, looped around the top of their cube, blinking madly away in a room that already nearly as bright as the sunlight outside (which is to say kind of gray and coming from everywhere). From where I am sitting I can see a plush Undertaker Doll (the wrestler, not the monster truck… sadly), A Nerf cannon that is controlled via USB by the persons computer, three different kinds of coffee makers, a plant (real), a white board, a lava lamp, and enough pictures to cover the walls of MOMA. It’s weird to see all of this in a place that I had always thought of a sterile environment powered on the souls of the people who worked there. It’s kind of nice to see that that isn’t really how it works…… for the most part.
Attitude. The people here again give lie to the idea that offices are full of straight-laced people with nothing more than their computer screen for a friend while they are at work. At least in this room, I have met so many friendly people that have such foul mouths and minds it is giving me hope that working in a cube might not actually drum the spirit out of the cynical and often foul-minded person that I am today. It his hilarious to hear people trading jokes that probably shouldn’t be traded in polite company and laughing and such and as soon as the phone rings switch to business mode and speak to the caller in a sultry, even tone that does little to show that they had just been slamming the person next to them for an accidental double entendre.
Food. I have worked here for three weeks and have already consumed more cake than a fat kid whose birthday is every day. Sandwiches, vending machines… it is all a little too much for someone who is trying to eat healthy and stay in –relatively – good shape. The people here are constantly snacking on things… the kind of bored grazing behavior that is more indicative of bison roaming the plains of South Dakota than an office in the middle of one of the most health-conscious cities in the country.
I don’t really know how to take this. It is a very odd shift from being in the face of the customer, either getting them over caffeinated or boozed up, to helping people 3,000 miles away figure out how to turn on the computer. Working in an office has shown me an entirely different side of the workforce than I ever thought that I would ever see, and it is a strange, strange side indeed.
