It was one of those offhand comments that seem more profound the more you think about them.
Summer of 2019, it was. Before the fall. A college friend of my wife’s visiting from New Jersey. Six kids between the two families, at the time ranging from entering sixth grade to entering college. On the patio out back, plastic stem glasses of white wine in hand as the sun set over the 12th hole of the Noyac Golf Course across the street.
“Oh, it’s just incredible that anyone ever thought they could work,” the friend said.
Offices, that is. The beige partitions, the fluorescent lighting, if you’re lucky a water cooler. The chinos and forced cordiality. But she meant interpersonally, of course. Somebody once believed it was a good idea, or at least inevitable, that workers gather together in such a way for the sake of a group endeavor, Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Hell is other people” dictum be damned.
I worked in such a setting after college in the Midwest. It was a faceless office building in a Minneapolis suburb, where the only fun and interesting feature was the elevator. I commuted in a tie and polyester dress shirt to copy-edit and dump into Quark Xpress pedestrian words accompanying a series of multimedia self-help books — in the early 1990s multimedia meaning a cheap illustrated paperback that came with a floppy disk.
It was billed as a start-up. A decade later and we all might have been playing Ping-Pong in an open floor plan as we hashed out ideas before sampling the office juice bar, but as it was, the experience was a major factor in sending me out of a city I loved and up the Alaska Highway in a two-door Honda with my girlfriend shotgun, cat in a carrier on the back seat, and belongings rooftop in a Sears X-Cargo carrier, if you remember those — like a giant Big Mac container and barely sturdier.
Now that the pandemic has exposed the pointlessness of most offices as so many of us work remotely and may never go back, I’ve enjoyed reliving the past by perusing the New York Times “Work Friend” advice column. “Anonymous” wrote in last month to agonize over an “office mean girl” who kicks her down in meetings and makes “snarky comments” about her “in front of others.”
Tellingly, the columnist, Roxanne Gay, answered in part, “Unfortunately, there is little recourse for immaturity and petty cruelty.” She added, only a little more helpfully, “You aren’t the problem here. Your colleague is.”
But everybody loves an easy target. Just look at social media.
No, Anonymous poses an existential question, and deserves an existential answer. Like the one from that joke Bill Clinton used to tell, about the guy who falls down the Grand Canyon, grabs a twig to save himself, then the roots of the twig come loose, and he’s about to plunge to his death. “Lord, why me? I pay my taxes. I go to work every day. Why me?”
“Son,” the voice from the heavens answers, “there’s just something about you I don’t like.”