The Joy That Is The Office Ladies Podcast

To hummingbirds, backpacks, and scotch with Splenda

It was yet another day of the new normal. Everybody kept promising that the virus would be gone in no time, and then it returned, crueller than ever. Delta, they called it. Second wave, maybe there will be more. I avoided the news like, well, the plague (Too soon to crack this joke?). People were dying by the hundred after fighting a virus they didn’t even have time to fully understand.

Back home, in my little study, at my small table, a different war was waging: A war I didn’t know how to describe. So instead, I decided to listen to a podcast and pretend everything was fine. I took my phone and earphones to my balcony and walked in circles while munching through a bar of Kit Kat.

“Yes. My backpack analogy,” actress Jenna Fischer was saying. She enunciates every word and syllable like I do, I remember thinking.

“The way I think about it is, my anxiety is a backpack that I wear every single day. I take it with me every time. But some days the backpack is heavy and some days it’s light and some days it really weighs me down and makes it super hard to walk through my day. And sometimes I barely notice it. But it’s always there and I’m never going to get rid of it.”

She was saying this to her co-host, actress Angela Kinsey. They were discussing mental health and Monday motivation strategies.

“But sometimes, man, the heavy backpack, you wake up, there’s no reason for it. You’re just like, man, it’s a heavy backpack day? You’ve got to be kidding me. Come on! And I hate that.”

My expression did not change, but something shifted inside.

“But, you know, that’s what it is. I’m no longer looking to get rid of the backpack and I don’t expect to. And just that little shift of acknowledging that it’s always there has really helped me a lot.”

Oh.

I am still convinced that our language has limited vocabulary to truly sketch out what it is like to be unwell. And not having the words to describe it meant that I knew less and less of going on in my head. The word “heavy backpack,” though — it was as close as you could get to describing how I feel. It meant I didn’t have to know what was going on. My backpack was heavy.

“What I love about our friendship and getting to work with someone who knows me so intimately,” Jenna said to Angela, “(is that) you have said to me, lady, how heavy is the backpack today?”

“Well, I love you and your backpack,” Angela chirped in her usual hummingbird-like way.

“Well, thanks, lady. Thanks. You help me carry my backpack a lot.”

There is little I can tell you about the Office Ladies Podcast unless you have experienced this podcast yourself. I love The Office; that goes without saying. And like every fan, I craved for more. I came upon this podcast accidently one day while watching Rainn Wilson’s Instagram story.

“The ultimate Office re-watch podcast,” the description promised. Each week, they break down an episode of The Office. There are behind-the-scenes stories, fast facts, tidbits that only two people who were there can tell us.

Pam and Angela doing a podcast together? I could not wrap my head around this.

The podcast already had over thirty episodes when I first came by it. I remember the day I clicked on Episode 1. The episode started with their intro, which is now so close to my heart that I have it completely memorized. “Hi, I’m Jenna Fischer. And I’m Angela Kinsey. We were on The Office together. And we are best friends.”

Best friends? I look back to that time and think it funny that I thought these two couldn’t be friends. Angela and Jenna share so little screen time on The Office that it was easy to believe they would have been just acquaintances in real life.

Nowadays, I watch The Office, and every time Angela and Pam fight, all I see are two best friends trying not to laugh and ruin the take. I can’t take their fights seriously anymore. How the turntables, indeed.

It takes a special kind of nerd to stick with this podcast. Did you know that if you wake up to find a bat in your room, you have to go to the hospital because there is a very high chance the bat bit you but you did not feel it at all? Or that the beats of Stayin’ Alive can really be used for CPR and was actually used by multiple people to save lives?

I know now that there is something called a Safety Meeting that is done on every show and movie where there are explosions and fires. The Office had them too. For a candle.

I know how they created snow in peak summer in LA, how they made the little coffin for the dead bird, and what went into the shot where Meredith lights her hair on fire.

I know the details of the meetings that were had over Pam’s hair and wardrobe. I know that Pam’s and Jim’s tables were specifically placed that way, different from the U.K. original, so that when Pam looks up, Jim is right there. But Jim has to turn himself to see her. And he does. He always does.

I know that nobody could get through the scene where Dwight reads out “Hot Dog Fingers” without bursting into laughter. If you look closely, the editors kept the accounting department’s actual laughter in the show. Actually, I can now mostly guess when an actor is about to “break,” a word that we in the Office Ladies World use for “break character and begin to laugh.”

I know that Ed Helms learned the sitar on the day of the shoot and so did Rainn Wilson with the German version of Take Me Home, Country Roads. I know that the character Isabel is named after Angela’s daughter and that Cece is named after Jenna’s niece.

Filmmaking is really just a bunch of people putting all of their hearts and lives into telling a story. It takes two very special nerds to capture that kind of magic.

Jenna and Angela jokingly play around with this idea of creating a detective show about two moms who solve little mysteries in their locality. Who stole the garden hose? Is the old house down the street haunted? Who filled the hummingbird feeder with grass? The Mom Detectives may not end up solving the crimes they set out to solve, but they will land up with loads of fun facts about gardening and ghosts because they are two ladies who love to Google.

My favourite episodes are where they go on random tangents about possible plotlines for this show. Every tangent, really, is incredible. Did you know that in the American South they “chunk” something rather than “chuck”-ing it?

As I said, there is hardly anything I can say about this podcast if you haven’t experienced it yourself. Hardly anything that makes cohesive sense anyway.

All I can say is that the friends that help you carry your heavy backpack are rare to come by. And sometimes, they come by as two ladies, sitting at a podcast table, nerding-out about filmmaking just as much as you do and telling you all about the best years of their lives — their friendships, their heartbreaks, their achievements, their near-death experiences.

Thanks, ladies. Thanks. You help me carry my backpack a lot.