The all-staff briefer
Yes, we understand: you need to know exactly who has stolen your “I Love Monkey World” mug from the sink, and you need to know in a manner almost scientifically designed to ensure that whoever did steal it will now never own up. But, although your mug clearly has sentimental value, does the head of international marketing need their day interrupted to know about it? Does every single member of the catering team need to empathise with your struggle? Is Dipesh, who works at the outsourced IT department in Bangalore, really likely to have it? Oh, and now look! Every budding office stand-up is chiming in with some cracking “reply all” banter about where the mug could be!
The screen rubbernecker
Look mate, it’s hard enough to work in here with you craning your head towards my desk, vaguely pretending to be looking at some distant wall planner that is clearly not within the range of any human eye. So imagine how hard it is to skive. Basically, I came into work today with two specific and achievable goals: to find out who my colleague Sara snogged last night, and to run down the clock cracking some jokes on Google chat. Your rubbernecking is ruining my productivity by, like, 85%.
The YouTube menace
Countless amounts of money have been spent looking into smart ways to increase productivity: switching around the desks, digitising calendars, hiring someone to come in and walk around looking sinister with a clipboard for a few days. Little do companies realise that they could double their output simply by locating that guy Dan who keeps interrupting you to show a German clip of Hitler in Downfall – hilariously subtitled to reflect Crystal Palace’s 2013 promotion to the Premier League – and unplugging his ISDN cable.
The tech warrior
They’ve got the latest smartwatch, which unleashes an ironic blast of Crazy Frog every time their latest Vine gets liked. They’re mapping office productivity with an app that tracks how long you’ve just spent on the toilet. They deliver you stationery via miniature drone. You long to smack them around the face with your broken Nokia ... but they’d probably Periscope it live to your boss.
The phone foghorn
Consider it a one-man play, with the office a theatre, the staff the audience, and the sole role taken on by the most annoying person in the office. Just because it’s a client on the other end of the line doesn’t mean the rest of the office needs to hear about how drunk you got at the weekend and the fact your car still needs a new exhaust.
The coffee bore
There was a time when the only coffee ritual of the day involved pressing three buttons on a machine, before dejectedly pouring the lukewarm sludge down the sink and getting a glass of water instead. Now it has become accepted practice to abandon work for an indeterminate amount of time to attain, Blumenthal-style, the perfect brew. This is not sensible practice if you work in a coffee shop, so it’s certainly not on when you’re handling admin in HR. And yet there you are, slowly assembling an AeroPress pump and blooming your grinds with a drip kettle, or heading to the local deli and waiting until Maurizio (real name: Dave) is available because he once won an award for his macchiato foam in 2009. “I need it to get me through the day,” you hear them say. Yes, and by the time they’ve got the damn thing, they’re already halfway there.
The online over-shopper
The post-room staff have developed impressive biceps since they joined the company: lugging their parcels up the stairs for other people to sign for while they’re trying on jeans in the quiet room, deciding they don’t quite fit, and sticking them back in the postbox to go back to the shop.
The real talker
It’s almost as if some people never had it explained to them that “How’s it going?” roughly translates to: “Please make three similar noises back, ensuring that we don’t have to endure a meaningful conversation for the next 17 years.” Instead, they treat it as a fresh inquiry, to which they are sworn to deliver the grim news that things are actually going shit: their relationship has gone to the dogs, their bus broke down, and their key snapped in the lock last night and they had to get a locksmith out and when he arrived he hadn’t brought the right equipment and then … are you bored yet?
The Tinder tragedist
Just because there is little drama inherent in working for a frozen-food conglomerate, doesn’t mean their role is to invent some. As with the phrase “I had a really weird dream last night”, so a date disaster story is normally of interest to nobody other than the person who experienced it. I’m sure it’s interesting to her that he turned up crying while carrying a picture of his ex-girlfriend’s dog, but if anyone else gave even the slightest toss about this then it would have been made into a dodgy sitcom starring Ralf Little by now. And it hasn’t.
