Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Office potluck? Oh joy...


Ok, so I fake the funk pretty well, but at the end of the day I DON'T. LIKE. PEOPLE.  I like my friends and family. But just random people in general? I'll pass.  Thing I miss most about my previous jobs is that because I was in a central university office, the only people I had to deal with outside of the faculty I assisted were my actual in-office coworkers.  If we went to lunch, cool. If not, no biggie. But at least I got to know most of them pretty well, some became friends, and a few I consider  family. But now that I work for a particular college within the university, I'm expected to become apart of this college's community.  So, instead of just socializing with my coworkers and boss, I have to form relationships with ALL the offices within the college, ALL the faculty... even the dean regularly drops by my office to cross his legs and take a load off. *cringe* Good grief.  While some people embrace the thought of emerging themselves into the system, I loathe it. And what do I loathe more than random faculty referring to me as kiddo while inquiring who sent the flowers on my desk? Eating with strangers, that's what.  I ABSOLUTELY hate it.  For me, eating is an intimate pleasure and the more pleasant the experience, the better my digestion. Eating should be accompanied by unforced and easy flowing, LIGHT conversation.  I HATE business lunches/dinners- I can't think about how good my food tastes if I'm focused on trying to craft intelligent responses.  I hate "official" office lunches as it is inevitable that the entire lunch will be filled with work chatter. IF I JUST LEFT FROM WORKING WITH YOU, I DO NOT WANT TO SPEND MY ONE BREAK OF THE DAY EATING WITH YOU AND TALKING ABOUT THE WORK I JUST RAN AWAY FROM. Finally, for this post anyway, more than anything, I just really hate schmoozing.  I consider this to be everything from making clever jokes with the random business manager you correspond with, to grinning through the terribly unfunny jokes of your boss' boss, to pretending like you actually give two shits about the mission of your organization and whether or not it accomplishes all its goals for the current fiscal year.  I do not give two shits.  They don't pay me enough to.  They pay me just enough to give a shit about whether or not I'm doing enough work in order for them to keep paying me.  That it is it.  I just want to come to work, do my job well, and leave.  I want to take my lunch break as an opportunity to divorce myself as much as I can from my 8-5 in an hour and a half's worth time.  But for some reason, people who live to work decided that people who spend 8 hours a day together don't spend nearly enough time socializing and getting to know one another.  Why not put that hour of freedom to good use and force everyone to continue talking about that killer budget together over strange looking, unidentifiable dishes made by that "crazy cat lady" administrative assistant who doesn't wash her hands after using the bathroom? Yep, that sounds like the best idea ever to me!

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