Almost Sunshine

I think I might have seen the sun today. It was brief and it was filtered but, for a few brief minutes, I think the gloom tried to go away.

Of course, it didn't go away. Instead, the sun went away. Then it rained. The end.

Just kidding. If I ended the blog there, anyone who is even a slightly regular reader would probably fall off their chair in shock at the mere fact that I wasn't rambling.

Tomorrow, we're supposed to actually see the sun for real. I'm holding out a little hope, I must admit. This lack of sunshine is making everyone crotchety and cranky...not just me.

I suppose I could argue that maybe I really am the crotchety cranky one and I'm projecting but, well, for once, that's not true. My entire office has been bickering all week. Case in point- our youngest account manager was yelling at our branch administrator to buy chewing gum with sugar in it. She usually buys sugar free gum. She was getting rather angry with him about it. Of course, I helpfully stepped in and told our young 'un that there was a nice cannister of sugar in the kitchen and perhaps he should stick some of that in his mouth when he chews the gum but that didn't go over very well.

We don't seriously bicker in our office. It's actually quite like sibling bickering. Mostly, it's sort of endearing although sometimes, as in the case of siblings, there are times when I'd quite like to throw something at someone elses' head but it's all done with fondness.

Actually, we're a little spoiled in our office anyway. I mean, not only does our branch administrator provide gum for us but she also buys Coke and Diet Coke and Mountain Dew for the boys as well as microwave popcorn, large pretzels and Cheeze Nips.

I find this all rather nice. The 'boys' in the office tend to take it for granted. When I explain that at my last job we had to pay 35 cents for a can of drink, they think my old office was cheap. I'm not going to say they weren't but, honestly, I didn't mind having to pay. For one thing, when something isn't free, you tend to think before you indulge. Because I get Diet Coke for free at work, I drink it almost every day.

All in all, my office is a good place to work. Even on days like today where two of my candidates decided to quit their jobs and another one turned down a position we were offering him, I like my job. Granted, it would be nicer if everyone stayed in the jobs I found for them forever and people were lining up in the street to work with me but, being a realist, I celebrate the small triumphs such as finding someone a job who really needs it and being able to make sure that someone's contract is extended.

As I always say, it's the small things in life that make it worth celebrating. On gloomy days like today, yesterday, the day before that and the day before that, I find that finding something to celebrate is necessary. In my case, it's that I had a productive day even if it wasn't the most successful. One of my 'quitters' is a man who's finally found a permanent job and though I'll be sad not to work with him anymore, I can't help but be thrilled for him that he's going to have some stability. That's something I think worth celebrating even if its not really a triumph for me.

I'm hoping that tomorrow, I'll be able to celebrate seeing some real, live sunshine. If not...I'll try to find the silver lining on the rather heavy cloud deck that never seems to go away.

But I'd rather it was sunny. Even for a little while.

Happy Thursday

Temperature Differences

There is a constant battle in our office regarding the temperature of our surroundings. Fortunately, the office is divided into halves- the front half is controlled by one thermostat, the back half another.

This hemispherical split is a good thing. Our branch administrator who sits at the front desk is one of those people who is always warm or even hot. She doesn’t wear a winter coat, she keeps her car temperature down around 50 in the winter and in the office, it’s a little like the North Pole in her region most days.

Since the rest of us don’t tend to run hot, this means we can control the temperature in our half without affecting her.

Most days, this isn’t such a hard thing. In the winter, those of us in this half of the office are a bunch of wimps and we like to be warm. I’m guessing in the summer, we’ll all like to be pleasantly cool.

It just seems that the in-between seasons might be a problem. I’m a firm believer in the fact that when it is hot outside, the heat should not be on in an office and when it is cool outside, we do not need the air conditioning on.

This philosophy is not terribly well regarded by some of the other members of staff. We have one staff member who comes in on some days wearing a short sleeved shirt and nothing else. Sometimes this is ok because he has a sweatshirt to put on if he gets cold. More often than not, however, he forgets his sweatshirt and starts complaining that he’s cold.

Thus begins the battle of the thermostat. He sneaks out of his office and turns the temperature up. He’s an extremist. He doesn’t believe in middles. Thus, if he’s cold, he’ll crank the thermostat up to 80 degrees to warm up quickly.

Meanwhile, the rest of us who are slightly more sensible, listened to the weather and dressed accordingly suddenly get very warm because we’re wearing sweaters because it’s cold outside. The heat kicks on and it becomes stifling. This leads to one of our account managers staking her claim in the thermostat and she comes out and turns it back down. Instead of stopping at a reasonable range of 72-74 degrees, she turns it down to 68 because it’s so warm.

This, of course, leads to the air conditioning coming on to compensate for the heat that was on before. It gets cold again.

Somewhere in there, I try to sneak out of my office and put the thermostat somewhere in the middle that will not allow the heat NOR the air conditioning to come on.

Today, it was a nice mild day outside. Thus, most of us in the back office space came in wearing lighter sweaters and shirts than we’ve been wearing because we knew it would be warm.

Not our weather-confused staff member, however. Instead of a short sleeved shirt, he comes in with a thick sweater AND shirt on.

Naturally, halfway through the day, he got very warm. Thus, he came out, set the thermostat to 65 degrees and then went back into his office.

This of course meant I was suddenly quite cold. I don’t like to be cold at work. It’s hard to focus. I try to drink coffee to warm me up but there comes a point where the chill from the air conditioner becomes too much and I have to do something about it.

Today, this meant I gave the coworker a nice polite suggestion that perhaps he take off his sweater rather than turn on the air conditioning. He’s our youngest staff member and I find that he has a tendency to act like the bratty little brother you love to bicker with. I’m not the only one who feels this way and on any given day, someone is teasing him, lecturing him or generally teaching him something.

He takes it very well and dishes it right back. Thus, my nice polite suggestion that he take off his sweater turned into a discussion that went something like this:

Me: Hey, X…did you turn the air conditioning on? X: Yes. I was hot.
Me: The rest of us our ocld.
X: I don’t care.
Me: Don’t you think it might be smarter if you took your sweater off before you turned on the air.
X: No. I was hot.
Me: You wouldn’t be hot if you took off your sweater.
X: I don’t want to.
Me: Why?
X: Too much effort.

At this point, my fellow recruiter, we’ll call him K, comes out of his office.

K: X! It’s cold in here.
X: So?
K: Did you crank up the air?
X: No, [captain monkeypants] did.
Me: Don’t tell fibs! I did NOT!
K: X, you did it. I’m turning the thermostat up.
X: I didn’t do it! It’ll get hot in here.
K: Then take off your sweater.

On and on it goes. At some point, the branch administrator will come back and banish X to his office because he’s acting like a brat. Then K will adjust the thermostat. Then someone else will decide they’re hot or cold.

Our office is actually like a family. Our boss is the authority and the rest of us are the bickering siblings who get along well when we’re being professional but when we’re relaxing, we bicker, snipe and snark at each other. It’s all done with fondness of course.

This is the kind of thing that make days at work fun, even slow days. It’s nice that we all get along, even if we do pretend otherwise. It makes for interesting discussion ranging from Charlie Sheen and his recent insanity which led to a discussion of the difference between crack and cocaine to discussions about British slang, animal husbandry and what flavor of lollipops everyone likes. It’s things like this that mark the difference between a job you do to get paid and one you enjoy because it’s fun and you feel like you belong.

Of course, things would be better if we could be in agreement about the thermostat but, well, honestly, squabbling over it is just a daily tradition and where would we be without those?

Happy Thursday!

Variety is the Spice of Life

It’s nice to work in a busy office building where our office isn’t the only one there.

My old job was in an office park that was, at the time, being refurbished to bring in new tenants. We rarely ventured into the other buildings except for the time we went to scope out the koi pond/Japanese style water-garden in the atrium of one of the buildings that our CEO felt was very necessary to entice tenants. Personally, I thought the whole atrium smelled like fish and not the good and yummy grilled-with-lemon-and-rosemary type of fish smell but, rather, the type of smell that comes from having a badly ventilated area with a fish pond in it. It was not pleasant.

Anyway, that was as much interaction as we had with other companies there. That is to say…none. It was pretty boring to see only the people you had to work with every day without the hope of running into anyone interesting that I didn’t know. There was hope at times. Our CEO also thought that clearing the area around a forgotten pond that was attached to the office park would make it a very social area while also making it appealing to would-be tenants. Of course, the reality of that was that the pond was unearthed for a while but lack of maintenance made the walking path around in impassable after a few months. Also, said pond was really just a rather large, muddy body of water. There was a little deck built to extend over it but only in the spring/fall was it appealing to stand on because otherwise you’d a) be bitten to within an inch of your life by hungry mosquitoes that used the pond as their spawning ground or b) be subjected to the smell of the pond which was not terribly pleasant.

I’m not bitter about it. The money for these renovations came from a different budget than that which funded my old company. It just seemed as though this money could have been put to better use. It was the same budget that funded the building we moved into that hosted The Most Optimistic Bathroom in the World and forbade us to complain about anything in this ‘perfect’ building for fear of getting fired.

It’s just nice to work in a building in which you don’t feel it necessary to occasionally drop to your knees in front of the CEO, splay on the floor and say “Thank you, oh Spanky for this beautiful building!”

Instead, I get to go to work in a building that has a bathroom that’s unadorned by anything. We can get things fixed by simply calling down to the property management office without feeling ike we might in trouble because it might be considered a ‘complaint.’

Also, it’s just nice to be in a place where I don’t know everyone in my building.

This makes life interesting. Sadly, book lady was fired from her job so I haven’t seen her in a while. Apparently, she was not the most pleasant HR lady in the world and was relieved of her position. I wish her well and hope she finds a new job where she has no pesky stairs to have to navigate while reading. At least now I don’t have to worry about her falling.

Our office is actually on a floor that has two other companies on it. It’s quite nice because one of the companies is large and there’s a plethora of people to watch. Also, our branch administrator knows everyone so all I have to do is say “who’s that?” and I can get a short biography of them.

What’s nice is that the office across from us is IT related and there are a nice lot of men who work there. This may not sound like a big deal but as a Singleton who’s been working in an office where the only men are the ones you work with and there’s no one particularly eligible or interesting, this is a very big deal.

It’s not that I’m expecting to meet Mr. Right but it’s just nice to look if that makes sense. The fact that our branch administrator is also a single woman makes it more fun because we can have little sessions where we just watch to see who passes by the clear glass doors of our office and wait for the elevator which, conveniently, is located right outside our office door.

It just makes the day more interesting. I’ve learned that the older gentlemen who dresses well is actually British and he flies home to the UK every other week to see his family who still live there. I’ve learned that the crabby little man who I see often and who always buttons his coat wrong is actually a developer that my old company interviewed for a job but didn’t hire him. I’ve learned that Book lady was actually Bad HR Lady who treated everyone rudely, smoked like a chimney and read her book so she didn’t have to acknowledge anyone. This is ironic for a human resources person, I find.

I’ve learned that the company next to us does market research and occasionally they get samples of products they don’t want so they give them to us. We currently have a large supply of off-brand mayonnaise in the office that has been here a while because no one wants it.

In short, it’s fun to work in my building. It’s as unpredictable as my work day- I never know how busy I’ll be when I walk in the door. I like life like this- it’s fun to be completely swamped on day and then have a day where the phone is quiet, no one returns email and I have to find new resources to find resumes.

It’s as unpredictable as the conversations we have in our office and the impromptu gatherings we have at the front desk in which we find something to Google or in which we take a brief Cosmo quiz.

It just makes life fun when it’s not the same old thing every day. I kind of love that.

Happy Thursday!

Holiday Fever in the Office

Today was definitely not a Monday. I woke up in a far better mood and managed to have quite a productive day at work. This is actually quite a feat since the holiday spirit has hit everyone in our office and everyone is a little more relaxed.

My office is an interesting place to work. There are six of us altogether and it's an interesting bunch. It's the kind of office where you're just as likely to be discussing work in our daily update meeting as you are the, uh, sexual prowess of a pig. Today's meeting ended up with one of my coworkers going online to see if she could, in fact, confirm that a pig's penis was really the same shape as its tail.

In case you want to know, it seems that it is.

I can't tell you how we even began this discussion. I think it was a coworker who just wanted to share something he'd seen on National Geographic.

My point is that my office is rather laid back at times. Today, for example, the three men in the office were taking turns playing golf in the open space we have.

It's a nice change of pace from my last office where even having a conversation in my cubicle felt like a crime. The nice thing is that everyone works. There's no one who doesn't pull their weight but we're still allowed to have fun.

It's nice to have fun at work. It makes it easy to get up in the mornings and go into the office. I haven't once had that "Oh, no, I do NOT want to go to work today" feeling that became so familiar in my last job. I mean, granted, it's not like I'm leaping out of bed in the mornings and saying, "YAY! I GET TO GO TO WORK TODAY" because, well, let's face it, given a choice, would any of us really be that excited to go to work if the alternative was staying home in a nice warm bed?

Yet I don't mind going in and the days tend to go rather quickly. They go very quickly on days when we are in an urgent rush to fill a position. Those are the days where I look up and it's lunch time or it's already time to leave.

Then there are days like today where the holidays are almost upon us and even though there's work to do, it seems more fun to stand around and converse about random things. Today's topic of conversation was dinner at our bosses house. He's planning on making 'chicken Wellington.' Me, I think this will be interesting but then, as a foodie, I'll pretty much try anything once, especially if I don't really know what I'm eating. Chicken Wellington will be no feat for me but we have some finicky eaters in our office who are the type of people who order a dish in a restaurant and then say "no X, X or X" so, when they're done ordering, they've pretty much ended up with a tortilla and cheese or a potato and cheese or a cheese sandwich. They're all a wee bit nervous about the food. I'm quite excited- I like it when people cook interesting things and our boss has promised us that he'll have plenty of alcohol so if it's bad, we can compensate with liquor.

I won't be drinking that much because I have to drive home and, also, I have a personal rule about not drinking too much with coworkers, regardless of the setting and how comfortable I am with them. Besides, it's often more fun to watch other people get a little silly when they drink. One of my coworkers has already requested a designated driver and I can tell you, she's entertaining when she's had one too many glasses of wine. She's the type of person who pretty much says what she thinks anyway but with wine, there is no filter and no topic is off limits.

I haven't had a real office Christmas party in a while. At USC, we had a rather formal lunch every year. At my last company, we didn't even have any type of Christmas gathering last year so to have one that's already guaranteed to be interesting is going to be a pleasant change.

It's nice that the holidays have taken control. I suspect that for the rest of the week until we leave at noon on Thursday, things are only going to go downhill as far as work and topics of conversation go.

Given that today's topic of conversation was pig penises, I'm a little afraid.

Happy Wednesday!

Milk, Cookies and an Obligatory Nap in the Workplace...

There's a quote on my calendar today. It says: "Think what a better world it would be if we all, the whole world, had cookies and milke about three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down on our blankets for a nap"- Barbara Jordan.

I find that to be an interesting quote. In theory, it sounds like a lovely idea. I've always wondered what would happen if companies instituted a required nap/relax hour in the afternoons for everyone. It would be rather nice, at least in theory. Yet, based on experience in working in offices, I don't think it's much of a reality.

Don't get me wrong. I think it were announced in an office meeting room to the staff, their first reaction would initially be one of happiness and content. I mean, who wouldn't like to be given a designated lazy time, complete with snacks to soothe you to rest? From my own point of view, I like the idea but even when I was little, I coudn't take naps. I tried but I'd end up lying there awake. Finally, my teacher let me get up quietly and read a book in the corner while the other kids slept. I'd rather have gone to bed earlier back then and not interrupted my day with sleep.

I wonder if I'd be able to nap now. I can't even sleep on a plane very well at night. I can never shut my mind down for long enough to really sleep. Though, I will say, when I lived in L.A., there were days in the height of summer when the thermometer crawled past 100 degrees in which movement of any kind seemed exhausting and after a morning of activity, my roommate and I would flop on our beds and not move for a while. I think that might have constituted a nap.

Yet, my personal napping habits aside, I still don't think that the idea of having a regular 3 p.m. milk and cookie break complete with nap would work in an office. Here's my interpretation, based solely on experience:

Setting: A conference room in a small company. There are about 24 employees seated around a large table with some seated in the corner of the office back from the table. The four managers are also seated around the table. There are doughnuts at one end of the table. Some people are eating them.

Company President: We have some good news! We've decided that you work hard and we'd like to reward you by giving you cookies and milk at 3 p.m. every day followed by an hour nap.

There is murmured whispering. Some people are smiling. Others...are not.

Employee #1: That sounds great but I'm on a diet. (She pointedly looks around at the people eating doughnuts. At least one employee looks embarrassed and lays their doughnut down). Will there be healthy snacks as well?

Company President: Well, it's a milk and cookie break so no. We'll try to have some lower fat options.

Employee #1: Those won't help. They're not on my Weight Watchers.

Company President: You are also permitted to bring your own snacks.

Employee #2: I'm lactose intolerant. As you're probably aware, this is a medical problem. I cannot drink milk. What will you do to cater to that?

Company President (a note of irritation in his voice): There will water.

Employee #3 (quietly from the corner of the room): Do we have to take our nap?

(A pause.) Company President: Well, if you can't sleep, we can't force you.

Employee #3: Will we have to work an extra hour to make up for the hour we're sleeping?

Company President:(glancing at the other managers): Well, we discussed that and for now, we agreed not to do that. However, if productivity does go down, we will rethink the whole thing.

Employee #3: What if I need to work through my nap? Can I leave an hour early to compensate?

Company President: No.

Employee #4: But if we have vital work to do, why shouldn't we work through our nap and then just leave early to go nap at home?

Company President: Because the nap is company sponsored. If you nap at home, it isn't.

Employee #3: But if we're losing an hour of work because of this, it isn't fair. I have important work to do. I shouldn't be penalized for being efficient.

Company President: A nap is not a penalty.

Employee #3: It is if you need to work. You're saying I have to drop everything and nap. I'm being required to drop everything and nap.

Employee #5: What if we have a meeting scheduled at 3 p.m.?

Company President: Don't schedule meetings for that time.

Employee #6: Sometimes we have to!

Employee #3: Yes! Are you saying that the people we're meeting with are napping too?

Employee #4: And if we're travelling for business, do we still have to nap? I mean, technically we're on the clock, so are you saying we have to nap for an hour?

Employee #5: Right! And what if we are travelling. Do we take milk and cookies with us? Will we be given a per diem?

Company President: FINE! I TAKE IT BACK. NO NAP OR COOKIES FOR YOU!!!!!

The only thing I exaggerated in this discussion is the length. If it were a real meeting, it would go on for at least another 30 minutes. It may seem ridiculous but, believe me, I've heard this discussion in one form or another throughout a lot of my working life. Management try to be nice but the employees don't get that or they abuse it. It's sad. If you're wondering, I would not be any of the employees in the discussion. I'd be the one quietly sitting there trying not to laugh because of the ridiculousness of it. Then I'd go and write a blog about it.

No, my company hasn't tried to institute a milk-and-cookies-and-nap policy but they have tried various other mini-perks that have worked against them. They tried to require us to take a 30 lunch because they felt like it was good to have us take a break, stretch our legs, get some fresh-air, etc. That did NOT go over well. People felt targeted because of their child-care situations. They were used to skipping lunch and leaving early. While I agree that is rather nice, it is also nice to have a 30 minute period in which I can actually NOT work and it's ok.

Anyway, until I read my calendar, I had no idea what to blog about today. Fortunately, the quote inspired me. I, personally, would rather like to have milk and cookies at 3 p.m....as long as it wasn't an obligation. Also, I'm not actually big on cookies. I like milk but not always. There's just no pleasing us all, is there?

Happy Tuesday!