The office romance
. . . and other endangered traditions
Sigmund Freud was lying on the purple velvet couch in his office dreaming of Oedipus and his mama when he suddenly shot up and shouted: “Hedgehogs!” From the kitchen down the corridor, Mrs Freud could be heard muttering irritably under her breath. She was used to her eccentric hubby chuntering on about loonies and childhoods and delicate society women, but hedgehogs? Was he contemplating a new career as caretaker of the Vienna zoo?
Sigmund dashed to the kitchen where the missus was preparing her famous apfelstrudel. “Hedgehogs,” he repeated in a whisper, frantically twirling his moustache (obsessive behaviour, please call a shrink).
Even tho’ she was battle-hardened in the art of deciphering wacky-speak, Mrs Freud looked perplexed.
“Don’t you see?” said Sigmund irritably. “Humans are like hedgehogs. They need to cuddle together to get warm … but if they get too close they get pricked.”
Mrs Freud would have been chuffed to know that in between dunking slices of apfelstrudel in his coffee, Sigmund would develop the theory of the hedgehog dilemma, a concept that would become part of modern office design. Put office hedgehogs close enough to ensure congeniality and co-operation, but not so close that things get all spiky.
But as Covid-19 accelerates the move towards virtual ways of working, the hedgehog dilemma could soon become a quaint relic of the past.
Similarly, many office traditions face extinction.
THE OFFICE ROMANCE
Career specialist website Vault.com found in a survey last year that 58% of employees had engaged in a romantic relationship with a colleague. The survey also found 19% of employees admitted to cheating on their significant other with a work colleague. The most notorious office romance would have to be the sex scandal of the 1990s when President Bill Clinton and intern Monica Lewinsky did everything but practise social distancing.
But let’s not diss the office romance entirely. Some beautiful relationships have come out of working together. Bill Gates met 22-year-old Melinda French at a press event in New York City in 1987. She initially played hard to get because she figured dating the CEO could backfire horribly.
Barack Obama met Michelle Robinson in 1989 at a Chicago law firm where he was a summer intern. He was immediately blown away by her long legs and overall fabulousness. (He wasn’t too shabby either.)
She initially rejected his overtures, saying it would look tacky for the only two African-Americans in their department to start dating.
But the pandemic has put a damper on love across the work desk. Having connection interruptus while whispering sweet nothings over Zoom isn’t quite the same as furtive meetings in the parking lot.
THE WATER COOLER RITUAL
Also heading the way of the dodo. Unless you’re employed in one of those grey cement buildings in Pyongyang, where looking sideways will get your head chopped off, you’ll know all about the water cooler ritual. (The coffee station ritual is another iteration of the water cooler ritual.)
It’s Monday morning and colleagues gather around the water cooler to exchange pleasantries. It could be remarks about the weather or the airconditioning, which is invariably too hot or too cold, too stuffy or too breezy. Eskom’s failures are another conversation generator.
Sport is a water cooler natural. After a marathon weekend binge on DStv, victorious fans are saluted as if they themselves scored the winning try or saved a crucial goal. The losers are bereft, humiliated, their only option a sheepish grin on their faces while they slink back to their desks.
Soccer is the lingua franca in any office in SA and its longevity goes way beyond the water cooler. The English Premier League is particularly dominant. Worker A might not know if Worker B is married, gay, has children or a criminal record, but Worker A will know which team Worker B supports and where that team sits on the league table. Skipping the usual pleasantries they’ll get right down to soccer code. “Crap ref!” “Awesome goal!” “Brilliant save!” “Red card!”
Water cooler exchanges wouldn’t have cracked it in the office of the father of the Russian revolution. Lenin had a daily diary chockablock with things to build and others to demolish.
After seizing power in October 1917, he inherited a country still thick in the throes of World War 1. He had to negotiate peace with the enemy so he could get on with the business of bashing aristocrats. The White Army toffs, who laughably thought they had any chance of defeating the proletariat, had to be crushed. Counter-revolutionaries had to be neutered and the imperial Romanov family executed. Then there was the gigantic task of destroying the entire fabric of Russian society and rebuilding it as a workers’ paradise. For anybody else this would have been a Sisyphean task, but not Lenin.
Indian Communist Party leader MN Roy wrote about meeting the high priest of Bolshevism in 1920. The entrance to his office was guarded by an army of secretaries, headed by an oldish woman “unassuming in behaviour, plain in looks and rather shabbily attired”. Pin-drop silence reigned in the large room occupied by about a dozen people. The woman in charge (yikes, petit bourgeois concept) moved silently from one desk to another. Everybody spoke in the lowest possible whisper. She was the only worker allowed to enter Lenin’s office.
The anteroom to Lenin’s office was always empty. No expectant visitor was ever kept waiting there. “Lenin did not share the proverbial Russian disregard for time,” wrote Roy.
Lenin received dozens of visitors a day but allotted times were short and calculated in precise minutes. A meeting could be nine minutes or 13 minutes. A couple of minutes before a particular interview was due to end, his elderly rottweiler pressed a button and a small electric bulb flashed on Lenin’s desk to indicate time was up.
Lenin was so driven to get things done quickly that the seven members of the politburo (yes, Mr Ramaphosa, only seven) were allowed to speak only twice at their weekly meeting, 15 minutes the first time and five minutes the second. So, no water cooler chitchat.
OPEN DOOR POLICY
US president Abraham Lincoln wasn’t one for social distancing. The White House had an open-door policy to the public and a crush of visitors besieged stairways and corridors, climbed through windows and camped outside Lincoln’s office door “on all conceivable errands, for all imaginable purposes”.
The official White House site says “neither custom nor security precautions shielded the president from his voraciously demanding public”. He was continually harangued by those seeking lucrative jobs in the new administration — the most vociferous among them his wife’s relatives.
The modern US president is decidedly off-limits to the proles and when he travels, Air Force One becomes an office in the sky. In her account of working for Obama, stenographer Beck Dorey-Stein details the rather tacky arrangement on board. Staff have to pay for their own drinks and snacks, and everything comes served in Styrofoam stamped with the presidential seal. She also wrote that in the prereality show host era the Oval Office parking lot was filled with Priuses. But in the post-reality show host era it was filled with Porsches and Maseratis.
THE CIGARETTE BREAK
Not every boss approves of the smoke break. A Spanish court this year ruled that employees could have pay deducted for smoking breaks. It is, however, an excellent opportunity to hear the latest office gossip. Where there’s smoke there’s always fire.
THE DAILY COMMUTE
A survey by the Ford Motor Co revealed the journey to work to be more stressful than being at the office. However, one of the disadvantages of working from home is the inability to switch off.
“You can’t disentangle home and work anymore, and that’s not always easy,” says Jon Jachimowicz, an assistant professor in the Organisational Behaviour Unit at Harvard Business School.
CORPORATE JARGON
As a rule of thumb the more jargon an employee uses the less capable they are. (And if the boss is prone to excessive company-babble, dash for the door.)
There’s “no brainer” (you have the brain of a cabbage), “touch base” (I’m watching you), “go the extra mile”. According to workplaceinsight.net this derived from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:41), which referred to a law that entitled Roman soldiers to ask any Jewish citizen to carry their belongings for a mile.
POWER DRESSING
Hugo Boss sales were down 31% in the first quarter of this year in the Asia-Pacific region. Louis Vuitton parent company LVMH saw a 38% drop in revenue in the second quarter.
For garment workers in Bangladesh the decline in overall sales has been catastrophic. Apart from China, the country is the top garment exporter in the world and employs more than 4-million workers.
The pandemic has highlighted the obscene exploitation Bangladeshi workers face at the hands of Western clothing brands. A recent survey by the Centre for Global Workers’ Rights revealed that 72.1% of buyers refused to pay for raw materials already purchased by the supplier. As a result, 2-million garment workers risk losing their jobs.
THE OLD BOYS’ CLUB
Will be missed by but a few. Harvard University and University of California researchers last year conducted a survey at an unidentified Asian bank and found that 38% of the pay gap between men and women was due to the informal male-to-male activities such as the long lunch, talking about sports or sharing a smoke break.
These days the old boys’ club is not necessarily made up of old boys but the toxic effect is the same.
OFFICE POLITICS
Goes hand in hand with the old boys’ club.
Nasa’s investigation into the 1986 Challenger explosion says it all. The space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight from Cape Canaveral in Florida, killing all seven crew members aboard including the first teacher to go into space.
Nasa launched an investigation to determine the cause of the catastrophe.
In The End of Office Politics as Usual, Lawrence B MacGregor Serven writes that scientists and engineers who worked on the space shuttle had been worried about the craft’s worthiness. Others just felt that it shouldn’t be launched. However, those interviewed never spoke up because they feared the political ramifications of doing so.