A Full Confession From the Past... You’re My New Best Friend. Well…Until You Get Fired or Quit You didn’t choose them, didn’t know them before, and possibly know little to nothing about their personal lives, but you spend more time with them than you do with the most important people in the world to you. That’s right, I am talking about your coworkers. The coworker relationship is one of the most interesting associations that we have in our society. If you assume that you work a standard 40 hour week, multiplied by 52 weeks, subtract 80 hours for vacation, 24 hours sick time, and 80 hours for Holiday related time, you will spend 1,896 hours with your coworkers this year. You fill 79 days of you life with awkward conversation with Barbara in accounting, unenthusiastic and poorly sung “Happy Birthdays”, and polite yet unrevealing discussions of weekend plans. To combat fatally smashing your head on a Formica desk or to fight the urge to build a fort out of discarded TPS reports, we manage to develop a friendship or two in the workplace. Though we believe that these friendships are initially created by choice, their development is truly inevitable. Nothing in this world builds a relationship faster than forcing people to be somewhere they don’t want to be, with people they don’t know, doing something they don’t want to do. So why don’t these coworker friendships seem to last? I tend to struggle to sustain contact with these people with whom I have shared intimate details of my life. I believe that we set up these relationships to fail by labeling them as different from actual “normal” friendships. In order to see how and why we do this, let’s start from the beginning. Like many interpersonal interactions, the coworker relationship begins with a lie. Many job interviews are done the staff sitting in a room staring at the new guy who is trying to infringe upon the designated group. We ask questions to our potential new 8-5 friend, nod our heads at his answers, say things like “Hmm...interesting,” while the entire time wondering what this person is really going to be like when we are forced to spend the entire day with him. After our new coworker is actually chosen, we try to approach him with things that we know and like about ourselves to see if a friendship is possible. Our simple catch phrases have concealed meanings: Question: “What d’you have planned for this weekend?” Translation: I need to know if you go out drinking or to Church so that I can tailor future conversations as to not violate HR policy and/or to recruit another person for Friday’s Bar Crawl. The beautiful part of this friendship is that the initiation is easy. You’re hired, show people you’re normal, and then you get invited to everything from happy hours to christenings. It‘s so simple. You become someone’s pal only days after sending in your resume. You apply for a job, you get a friend. Still, even though we have established that we can be friends with our coworkers, we find a very obvious way to keep them at an arm’s length. This scenario has happened to me a number of times. The new coworker comes up to me in a social setting while I am standing next to my “normal” friend. I introduce my coworker, my new best pal, to my normal friend and have the immediate need to qualify the introduction. “This is Steve. We work together.” Why do we feel the need to qualify the relationship with our coworkers to our other friends? We don’t do this with other relationships. “Hey, this is Jerry, we both enjoy watching and discussing the Yankees.” “This is Ron, we had a locker near each other freshman year and now we occasionally call each other to go out on the weekends.” These immediate explanations of our associations seem ridiculous, but for some reason we feel the urge to single out our work friendships. This friendship labeling does not have to be limited to cataloging a single person, but also works for the classifying a group dynamic. No one has ever successfully fully integrated their work friends with their normal friends because we designate certain outings as “work happy hours” and “coworker’s parties”. Announcing these events to your normal friends is a subtle warning to them not to attend. At some point in the night they will feel alienated as everyone involved knows what will ultimately happen. Work friends will talk about work. Even in the best of situations, the odds are against you. One of the most memorable coworker experiences is with my goody buddy Gary. Yeah, that’s right, just Gary. Not my work friend Gary. Not Gary, a guy with whom I shared a poorly constructed cubicle, just Gary. I say “just Gary” because I felt that during our time working together I had made a friend that transcended the boundaries of the convenient coworker relationship. Our hours of discussion and thought provoking dialogue made me look forward to my day, making it seem unlike… well… work. The time came when I had to move on and our friendship stayed strong. I had moved to Boston, but still called Gary on a weekly basis to joke and talk about things that friends do. We both invited each other to our weddings, though the fact that neither of us could attend should have been a warning sign. Our calls became less and less frequent, even though we lived only 3 miles from each other. Our relationship has survived only out of our sheer will to keep it going, powered by near misses at bars, voicemails, and poorly planned get togethers. Basically, our friendship can be compared to a gym membership. We both know where it is, we know we should go, but both make excuses to put it off because of the inconvenience. We can’t bring ourselves to cancel our membership because we know that it is a still a great thing, even if it is not being used. Why are these friendships destined to fail? I believe that while we seek out these bonds in the workplace, we also try to separate work from our personal lives. Our best and most common defense mechanism is through language, labeling these people as work friends, but the truth is that we often associate them with the stresses that our jobs bring. I am transitioning into a new job and am forced to yet again test the tensile strength of the coworker bond. I have made some truly amazing friendships at my latest job—friends I plan on keeping past the former coworker friendship expiration date (note: that can be as early 6-8 weeks). I know that it will take some work to keep these friendships alive. I actively try to not refer to them as work friends to bolster our chances of survival. I am trying to learn as much about them as I can so that we will always have something to discuss other than entertaining, yet unfulfilling office drama. I want my vacation days to be spent with these friends rather than away from them. Our friendship has never felt like a job, so there is no need to call them work friends ever again. --Nick Valentino, 2010
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 12:45:10 +0000
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