The Accidental Adult: Keeping sane in the workplace
Colin Sokolowski
Nothing sucks more than those first few jobs out of college. You’re the youngest one in the office, you make the least amount of money and you own the crappiest car in the parking lot. What’s worse is this financially necessary circumstance occasionally forces awkward social interactions with super-serious, super-old coworkers for eight to 10 hours a day while collaborating on projects that are miles away from your soul’s deepest yearnings.
This situation presents a unique challenge. You’d like to preserve your delusional self-identity that says you’re much cooler and more exciting than your humdrum work environment allows you to display. Yet you can’t exactly force your unbridled life philosophies down your colleagues’ throats, unless you want to be unceremoniously shit-canned from your job.
So how can you convey your personality at work without compromising your soul? Try these six boss moves to achieve workplace sanity.
6 Always Look Busy
Never walk down a hallway without a bulging, overstuffed folder under your arm. Carrying papers with you at all times tells your colleagues “I’m on my way to an important meeting with my thoughtful analysis and comprehensive response to resolve the crisis.” But in your haste, be careful not to clip a coworker coming around the corner. Your scattered papers littering the hallway now reveal you were on a five-minute aimless walk around the office corridors with your trusty fantasy football folder of draft picks, players’ statistics and trade requests.
5 Send Late-Night E-Mails
Sometime between your fifth Rolling Rock of the night and stumbling into bed, log into your work e-mail account and blast off a few carefully typed messages for your supervisor or anyone else whom you’d like to impress. Regardless of your actual activities at the moment (television), keeping your messages work related (not focused on your keen observation that you and your buddies are so like the guys on Entourage) is always a good idea.
4 Hang Up on Yourself
You’ve likely experienced the misfortune of enduring an unpleasant phone call from a client or customer. But business etiquette suggests you can’t exactly hang up on another person. Or could you? It all depends on when you terminate the call. Simply launch into what seems like a heartfelt apology and in midsentence hang up on yourself. The brilliance in this maneuver is that the caller will assume you’ve had phone troubles. Who would intentionally disconnect a phone call while they’re talking?
3 Beware of the Professional Professionals
These are the people whose sole purpose in life is to attend professional organization events just so they can interrupt the speakers to interject obvious observations or irrelevant questions that ultimately bring the presentations to a screeching halt. Once you spot these haughty fools at the morning keynote address, put a few rows of distance between you and them for the rest of the day, and avoid eye contact at all costs. If you’re feeling especially brazen, immediately follow up one of their asinine digressions by taking the microphone, shaking your head, and offering the speaker a “Sorry about that…” Then launch into an inquiry of actual substance. Your fellow conference-goers will revere you, and those fuming professional professionals will revile you. Nicely played!
2 Take a Seat (Away)
When you see or hear any undesirable coworker approaching your office, immediately stack up a pile of papers and folders on your guest chairs so your advancing colleague can’t sit down. Conversely, don’t forget to immediately clear off your chair when you hear Cara, the cute college intern, approaching. You wouldn’t want to miss her office rounds at 9 a.m. on Mondays when she offers salacious recaps of her girlfriends’ weekend escapades. But try not to look too obvious or overly anxious by rushing to your chair and sweeping it free of clutter with one broad stroke of your arm, knocking books and folders to the floor. Just be glad she might even consider talking to you. If you weren’t her internship advisor, you know you’d be SOL.
1 Use Decorum When Decorating Your Cube
No photos from your senior year Cancun spring break vacation. I know, drinking those body shots was the pinnacle of your social life, so naturally you want to share some photographic evidence proving you actually sucked tequila from your waitress’s
pierced navel. But trust me. Your colleagues already suspected you were capable of such crass debauchery. If you truly want to command a little respect from your colleagues between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., then show some restraint in sharing the details of your high jinks from 5 p.m. to 9 a.m. Which would you rather achieve at work: party cred or career cred?
Corporate America: You’re welcome!
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