Anything But Work

The Gallup Organization did a study that found a strong correlation between workplace satisfaction and "having a best friend at work". At first it seems like an odd connection, but it really makes sense to me. Most people hate their jobs, but if you have a friend to share your misery with its much more manageable! I'm lucky - in my office here at FederalEntity there are a handful of similar-minded, young government muppets who I can commiserate with. We spend, on average, 1.5 hours every day doing so.

Over the past three years, our clique has devised numerous ways to help the hours go by faster. I'll go into a couple of them here.

1. Terrible Tie Tuesday - I happen to have an impressive collection of terrible neckties. My coworker John does too. Every Tuesday for the past 4 weeks we've had a competition to see who has the worst necktie. Week 1 his reversible Xmas lights/Valentine's Hearts beat out my purple and brown hand-painted drop cloth tie. Week 2, my bright yellow and green tie with little pints of Guinness drawn all over it bested John's tie which was covered in little ducks. Week 3, his hand-sewn glossy green tie that was a foot and a half too long was defeated by my red tie featuring a huge picture of a little boy peeing into a lake. Yesterday my retro 60's heavily-stained yellow and green paisley tie lost to his navy tie with a giant hand-painted panda. So it's tied 2-2. The pressure is on for next week! I enjoy Terrible Tie Tuesday because it gives me something to look forward to on Tuesday (other than going drinking after work). Plus, there's something exciting about walking into an important meeting full of government bigwigs wearing a tie that features a picture of a little boy peeing.

2. Office Baseball / Mini-Golf - I have collected a fantastic assortment of stress balls during my time here, which are perfect for workplace diversions. Aside from throwing them at coworkers, these stress balls are great for baseball and mini-golf. If you dismantle a file cabinet, you'll find that there are several pieces of metal that are similar in length to a baseball bat or golf club. Give it a try, I'll wait... See how easy that was? Office baseball is pretty self-explanatory - have someone pitch the stress balls at you, and try to hit them as far as you can with the "bat". Bonus points if your hit knocks anything over. For office mini-golf, just put a coffee mug on the floor on its side. Then go to the other end of the office and see how many strokes it takes you to hit the stress ball into the mug. More than the competition itself, the looks that your coworkers give you as you "putt" a stress ball with a big piece of metal right outside of their cubicle are what makes these games so entertaining.

3. Cubicle Fortifications - If you share a cubicle wall with someone, you know how annoying it can be at times. You hear them on the phone. You hear them listening to music. They sneeze and you feel like you're instantly covered in their germs. You live in constant fear that they could throw something over the cubicle wall and hit you. If only there was some way to protect yourself! One day in a fit of boredom, I shot my former coworker Kevin with a rubber band over the cubicle wall that separated us. When I came into work the next day, Kevin had constructed a cardboard castle (with drawbridge) on top of the thin cubicle wall that separated us. The inter-cubicle aggression quickly escalated and so did the castle. Fences made out of office supplies, catapults, siege ladders, a giant turret, sand, fighter jets, plastic cowboys battling plastic fish - it was quite a battle scene. Our castle became so ridiculous that we were convinced that upper management would scold us for blatantly not doing work. Much to our surprise, when our director walked by our cubes after the castle had been built his only response was "oh, a castle." Kevin moved to another office, and the castle came down. He still has the main castle piece up in his new cubicle. The common response he gets when people see it is "Oh, a castle. Did your child make that?"

4. Prank wars - This will be the subject of my next post.