How not to make friends at work (and in life)

Making friends is overrated. More often than never, people suck, so just do yourself a favor and eliminate any chance you have of becoming buddies with people at work. While being a complete d*** (dick) is the easiest way to maintain your friendless state, it is crucial that you avoid that route for business purposes. Keep your friend-repellent tactics subtle and manipulate others into thinking that they don't want to be friends with you, not the other way around.

1. Go on the Stairmaster and try to talk to people while you're on it. You will start to sink and grab wildly at the handlebars. Any potential friends will quietly excuse themselves from the "conversation" and you will never hear from them again.

2. Browse funny things on your phone that you know will make you laugh while you are on the toilet. If there aren't people in the stalls already, someone is bound to walk into the bathroom while you are mid-laugh. You will be forced to have awkward interactions with them at the sink afterwards.

Sorry this photo is so big. Actually no, I'm not sorry.

3. Sit outside the entrance of the building after you workout. Take off your shoes and socks and pick at the sock lint between your toes. Make eye contact with anyone who walks by during this time. This is a guaranteed no-friends strategy.

4. Get Indian food for lunch.

5. When you're in your car heading home, roll down the windows and blast some Adele (any song will do; in this case I like "Someone Like You" the best). Sing along to this song with all that you've got. This usually is most effective if you suck at singing and only know every couple words or so: "I hate to show upmmm bum dumm...but I mmmmmbummmdummmmbmmmy face mmmbbbmmmu but for meeeeeeeee it isn't ooooverNEVERMIND I'LL FIND SOMEONE LIKE YOU. I WISH NOTHING BUT THE BEST FOR YOUUUUUU TooOOOOOOO"


This concludes the short, but potent list of how not to make friends. If anyone still persists on trying to be your friend after you complete the above steps, then kindly let them into your life.  

When you have nothing to do at work (part I)

What do you do when you have nothing to do at work? Leaving seems like the most reasonable solution, but what if, just what if your boss needs you to send that one email at some point in the next four hours? No, you cannot leave - that is the worst possible solution.

Recently, I've found myself workless at work. Mostly due to the fact that my boss has been away for a while, but even now that she's back I still find myself reading Thought Catalog, nodding and silently repeating, "Yes, yes that is exactly how I feel. You said it spot on, yes," while clicking around on my other two monitors every once in a while so that they don't assume screensaver mode.

As I do this, I tell myself that I should probably politely interrupt my boss and ask if there is anything she needs help with. But no, I can't - it's much too far into the work day and if I ask now she will know that I've been doing nothing all day. And no, I cannot ask because I am afraid that the answer will be 'yes,' it will be 'yes, Amanda why don't you go through all the documents in our database and make them pretty,' 'yes, go ahead and analyze the traffic metrics and present your findings nicely via spreadsheet.' These are my fears. But, then I'm trapped in this paradox of being workless at work. Do you feel bad like I feel bad when you think about how you're getting paid to do the same things you do at home when you're lounging around in your underwear with a bowl of cheese puffs stuck orbiting your gravitational field?

I don't want to do work, but yes I do - it hurts to do nothing and it makes every minute feel like six hours. That's a 2880 hour work day! Oh work gods give me work, let me sip from your good goblet of labor, let me have purpose in this corporate life of gray cubes and fax machines. And the moment the work gods grant you your stupid wish, you sulk and yearn for the purgatory of furtive internet browsing and dicking around. Which leads me to another point: dicking around in secrecy hurts terribly. It is an activity that should be executed freely, openly, expressively. But in the cube, where the walls are in all the wrong places and there is nowhere you can place your monitor without someone seeing the horrid non-work things on your screen, dicking around becomes unbearable. Reading an article about how to make your Mondays better in fragments hurts and you apologize to it like, "Sorry I cannot enjoy you fully and appreciate your humor completely because I have to hide you behind a spreadsheet."

But as all things go, when you're clicking and scrolling around with your eyes glazed over, you will, at 5:00 pm if you're lucky, hear a little sigh from your boss and she'll say, 'time for me to head home.' These magical words will perk your ears and you'll look up like a crazed mutt with a bacon milkbone dangling above his head, try to bid her goodnight without drooling or sounding possessed, and as her footsteps pitter patter away, you'll fantasize about all the wondrous dicking around you will do in the comfort of home, in your underwear, with your cheese puffs. This is what happens when you have nothing to do at work, which happens never, so bugger off!

Real Life Questions From a Real Life Intern

Can I eat these snacks lying around the office? How many pieces of candy are we allowed to take per trip to the admin's desk? Is it bad to walk around barefoot in the office? And if so, why? Can I call dibs on all the instant hot cocoa packets with marshmallows in the break room? Do adults even drink instant hot cocoa with marshmallows? Is the office PG or PG-13? Where do I go when I need to take a nap? Why don't I know the name of the lady I'm having lunch with? Do I say hi to the IT guy? Is he my friend? Is this dual-action printer also a Transformer? If not, why does it look like one? Why are all these office supplies free? How many office supplies can I take before I am cut off? Can I cover my cubicle with tapestries and curtains so it looks like I'm working in a gypsy tent? What is the office etiquette on farting? If you hear someone fart is it okay to laugh? Can anyone smell the banana I'm eating? Does having multiple computer monitors give off the impression that I'm working harder? What is the rule on replacing the office chair with a La-Z-Boy? Why are only certain people invited to lunch? Do high school cliques continue to exist after high school? What is the social paradigm of this particular office? Who do I talk to about implementing a 4 o'clock happy hour?

Today I checked under my desk to see if there was room behind the filing cabinets for me to stretch out and take a nap.

There wasn't.

The Cube Life

The feigned privacy of a cubicle is like your intrusive and slightly creepy friend that peeks at you through computer screen reflections (or any reflection for that matter - my least and most favorite being the unsuspecting iPhone, tilted at just the right angle so that you are able to make eerie eye contact with another) and/or takes pictures of your feet while you are in the bathroom stall (Trisha, if you still have that photo of my feet from the 9th grade, please do send over).

Thank you, Trisha.

Your cubicle is your personal space to decorate and personalize as you please - it becomes your cozy me-space. Some put up pictures of their family, really bad artwork their children made for them (why would you ever do that, I would never do that it looks so bad), some line their shelves with mugs and stuffed animals, books they'll never read - all in a desperate attempt to make the desolate gray feel a little less exposed and a little more like home.

Sometimes, just sometimes, when I am alone in my cubicle, which I conveniently share with my manager, I feel unexposed, clothed, private and intimate. So I open a new tab on my laptop like its a gift I shouldn't be opening on Christmas Eve but just wanna sneak a peek to see if it's an Easy Bake Oven (12 Christmases and still no pink and purple oven) and in my new tab, I type: what are the differences between an English bulldog and a French bulldog? or why do the two sportscasters for the American Olympic swimming time trials sit so close to each other so that their noses almost touch? or I simply browse images of funny exercise machines - all these little things that lift and tickle my soul. But then, I feel a light breeze behind me or hear the footsteps of The Man and all of a sudden I am exposed again and I snap back to reality. MUST ANALYZE THREE-HUNDRED VIDEOS. COMPLETE SPREADSHEET TABLES. SEND EMAIL TO PERSON IN INDIA. CHUG WATER. PHOTOSHOP CEO'S FACE. And just like that, my eyes become swirly again and my cubicle staycation is over.

The other day my manager was chatting with a co-worker who upon exiting, accidentally knocked off a coat hanger that hangs in our cubicle and my manager faked a melodramatic, "You're messing up my cube! This is our HOME!" And the three of us collectively shared an office-laugh, y'know like a golf clap - polite and contained but really inside it's like just waiting to explode from all the suppression. All of us that harvest in a cube farm develop a similar humor that is rooted in our bitter search for personal space and identity in the gray and angular. We share the pain, but more importantly we share the laughs, and of course we all have our own distinct ways to cope, our own means of finding the little delights in every work day, in every exposed corner and uniform space of the corporate farm. Welcome to the cube life.

The President and Me

The other day I found myself working out alone in the company gym, not sure why but maybe because it was after work on a Friday afternoon and everyone else went to go hang out with their friends and I don't have any. But anyways, I decided I needed musical company, so I flipped around the radio until I came to some classical station. Working out to classical music might be the single best thing in my life. It makes me feel like I am in a movie - a dark comedy about a lonely person working out to classical music on a Friday afternoon with no plans for the rest of the night.

This is kind of what I looked like.

Being alone in the gym made me feel a little bit more adventurous. I walked around and examined the funny contraptions that I usually keep away from in the company of others for obvious reasons. I decided on a machine called The Abductor, which seems appropriately and inappropriately named at the same time. I studied the diagram that showed a figure sitting in the position in which one assumes when giving birth. And so I did exactly that. After a couple reps, I couldn't take myself seriously anymore so I quit The Abductor and began working on my lack of abs. Mid-crunch, someone stormed into the gym and with my sweaty eye I caught a glimpse of none other than the president and CEO of the company. This was my first time seeing him in person and had just earlier in the day been Photoshopping his face onto various computer monitors for an online conference advertisement. I tried not to stare, but it was hard not to especially when all your co-workers and their bosses and bosses of bosses had been whispering about him for the past forever.


So as the classical music blared on the overhead speakers, I tried to continue my crunches as undweebishly as possible while I kept a close peripheral eye on the president (who upon entering the gym, bee-lined for the dumbbells and proceeded to grunt and pump his arms in a very mechanical manner). Well there went my really fantastic idea of going up and introducing myself to him, so I came up with an even more fantastic idea! Going on the Stairmaster! An exercise machine that I suck at! I stepped on (with good knowledge that my past experiences with the Stairmaster have all ended in pitiful failure) and began to sink into the depths of dweebdom, while clawing at the handlebars for my life. I regained composure after something along the lines of Bill Murray at the gym in Lost in Translation and started stepping away like a baus! Though I learned today that I was still doing it completely wrong - how does one fuck up so badly on the Stairmaster?? Such is the mystery of life.

After ten minutes of pretending to beast on the damn machine, I ducked out of the gym and breathed ten sighs of relief. I think I made a really good first impression on the president.

The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People

This is a play that I have not yet read but would like to read sometime in the near future. Read it with me here! The title of this play randomly popped into my mind as random things do and prompted me to look it up. What I gathered is this:

"We should treat all trivial things in life very seriously, and all serious things of life with a sincere and studied triviality." - Oscar Wilde.


I got some valid criticisms about this blog, especially about documenting the triviality about the very serious and, quite frankly, non-trivial institution of work. If my current employer and/or prospective employers were to stumble upon this seemingly harmless blog, my work ethic and their respect for me could be compromised. What concerned me the most was the attitude I was giving off - it may seem demeaning, disrespectful, and unappreciative. But that isn't my aim. My aim is to bring humor to this thing called work that we do.


We all do these things, we develop tactics to pass the work day faster and even though we don't always publicly admit it or document it, we all know it's there. The lull of the work day and that itch deep down somewhere inside of you that is telling you to just drop everything and drive to the beach. It's a point of relation, the coming together of the trivial struggles of the working kind. It's a point of humor - something to smirk about when you're staring at a spreadsheet of cold, emotionless numbers or as you're getting paid to poop.


As for this blog - I'm not too worried about it getting in the way of my future prospects. You just have to do good work and have something to show for at the end of the day - even if it means sacrificing a trip to the toilet.