The perils of office chit-chat

The real world is horrifying.

The normal words of douchey condescension — the warnings of the difficulty of the job search, bills, early mornings, whatever — in the end turn out to be pure bullshit.

Job search. You send out resumes. You interview. You get hired.

Early mornings. You suck it up and get out of bed every day.

Bills. You show up to work. You get paychecks. You use said paychecks to survive and/or have Happy Fun Time.

Granted, these steps all have their complications (the first one especially), but the horror? It’s not in the difficulty.

It’s in the monotony.

Shit’s boring in the real world, and the total lack of interesting conversation accounts for a huge slab of the boredom.

This fact reared its unfortunately banal head during my second week of work.

Due to the apparently rare habit I have of reading things, I had just read an article accompanying a picture of a man — a man in an unbuttoned dress shirt with “feminine” hair and make-up.

The photo pretty brilliantly points out that the illegality of women baring their chests in public is problematic. The reasoning is well ingrained: Women, obviously, have breasts, and breasts aren’t just body parts. They’re scary, private body parts meant for sexy time and sexy time only.

(1. That was sarcasm. 2. The tangent regarding what makes a body part erotic and what makes erotic bad is an important one, but as I’m shooting for 750 words here, it’ll have to wait.)

I found the picture and article important and fascinating, so much so that I felt pulled to what I thought was the sane & expected course of action.

I wanted to talk about it.

Fast-forward to about 7:45 a.m. a few days later, when a co-worker and I were alone in the five-person office I helped occupy at the time. I already knew that she was smart and at least slightly feminist, so my guppy, post-college brain figured the picture would be perfect discussion fodder.

As anyone who has worked in an office for more than three months can probably attest, I was horribly wrong.

“I agree that the image is provocative,” she said, picking each word with care, as usual, as though the slightest misspeak would set off some office bomb detonated by casual or interesting conversation. “But I think that the laws regarding women exposing their chests should remain in place.”

To this day I can only understand such lines of reason hypothetically; I can grasp that people think that way, but I’m totally lost as to the how or why of it. (The same applies to people who take the Bible literally and those who genuinely think Everybody Loves Raymond is funny.)

So I pressed on.

“Why, though?” was my innocuous-enough question. “What is it about certain body parts that makes them somehow dirty?”

She stumbled through a couple citations of irrelevant statistics, mainly involving, I think, male arousal at the sight of naked ladies. I pointed out that numbers aren’t actually arguments, but as the option of concepts was lost on her, the conversation eventually died.

The failure of that exchange bothered me for days; the almost-chat was my first hint of the scarcity of the chances to have an interesting conversation outside a university.

Turns out, though, that the issue went beyond stubbornly literal thinkers, something my boss pointed out during the performance evaluation I had after two weeks at my job.

“Katie, you’re remarkably self-assured for a 22-year-old,” he began, looking across the desk to where I sat, straight-backed but comfortable.

“Well, thank you,” I said, unsure of whether the emphasis was meant to be on “remarkably self-assured” or “for a 22-year-old.”

“However,” he said, face firm with the discomfort of someone who abhors confrontation, “some topics of conversation are too — well — personal for office talk.”

It’s been almost three months and I still reel at that word. If he had said “academic” or “non-bullshit-small-talk-y” or even “political,” I’d have been on board — annoyed, but on board.

And so I learned that the office is a bit like a public high school: The nerds have to stay silent to avoid disrupting the social order and causing, you know, thought to happen.

Because one of the horrors of the real world is that non-corporate brainpower is a serious no-no.

So yes, I work full-time. I pay my bills. I feed myself. No big — we get a blueprint for all that.

I just wish someone had warned me of what my boss’s intended descriptor for the topics forbidden at work —

“Interesting.”

Saving Giles (i.e., how I stop myself from killing my roommate's cat)

I work in a goddamn cubicle.

Every day I wake up at 6. Every day I catch a 7:10 bus so that every day I get to work at 8. Every day I work for four hours, lunch for one, and work for four more. Every day I leave the building again at 5, wait by the bus stop, and return to my apartment.

Every. Single. Day.

Twenty-two years have taught me at least one thing that I know won’t change: I absolutely abhor routine. I can’t sit still, I can’t stay in the same place for very long, and I sure as hell can’t do the same thing day in & day out without wanting to kill someone—or at least my roommate’s cat. (He’s kind of an asshole, though, seriously.)

In job interviews, I often tout my ability to adapt quickly to new situations, but I’ve since learned that there’s one tricky key element to that skill…

I need new situations.

Now, I learned years ago the importance of having a strong identity outside of my occupational or academic obligations; I knew better than to be just a student/RA/intern.

I knew that at least of equal importance was the fact that I speak French and play the ukulele and drink too much tea, that I edit and journal almost maniacally, that I put so much stake in reading that I’ve never felt more anxious than that during gap in between books when I’m not sure what to read next—and that, more than all of it, I love love love the people in my life.

I just had no idea how hard it could be to remember all that when stuck in a cubicle 40 hours a week.

I’ve heard from grownups that the key to maintaining happiness once morphing into a corporate drone lies in how you spend your off hours.

This mindset, though, always reeked of bullshit to me; the obvious implication is that 40 hours a week, I’d be a non-entity, giving myself up entirely to the endless expanse of cubicles, to a world in which I have to leave my cubicle and crane my neck to look out a goddamn window.

Some people probably have the gift of establishing a new identity for any given situation; they have a Work Self and a Parents Self and a Friends Self and a Class Self, and they glide in and out of these identities with ease.

My main question for these people, though, is this: who the hell are you when you’re not at work or in class or with other people? Who are you when you’re alone?

Maybe it’s a fault of mine that I only really have one Me figured out; maybe the ideal is to cut out dozens of little niche Me’s that go beyond the inevitable & slight behavioral modifications of Every Single Day. Maybe it’s a mark of my immaturity that my Me is sole.

But Jesus. I can say with certainty that were I to have established identities, I’d get lost in the Every Single Days that fill up 45 hours of weekly work and commute time.

So I have to conclude that the Me I have is enough; I have to be her and enforce her and let her grow, Every Single Day.

I have to read and allow the constant mental translation into French and play my ukulele and drink my tea and call my family.

Otherwise, I swear to Jesus, I’m going to wind up killing that fucking cat.