Office Etiquette

It’s not for everyone.

Let’s face it. Work is work. It’s a place where we are all forced to go for 40+ hours per week and many of us aren’t exactly thrilled about it. That being said, we are all in the same boat so there needs to be a set of rules to be followed in order to keep things on the up and up.

Lets start it off with personality issues. Everyone has had to stand there awkwardly while some coworker blathers on about shit you have no interest in whatsoever. Keep this in mind before you start a story. Take an extra second to really size up the person and make sure that they really want to stand there and listen to you. If the person is holding a stack of papers and you stopped them in the hallway as they were speeding by you, the odds are they are in the middle of something. At this time, it is your responsibility to tell your story to someone else. Once you find another poor soul to attempt to pour your troubles out to, use this rule again. Eventually you will find someone with extremely low self esteem that will endure the story. At the very least, save it for a better time.

In regards to personality issues, let me give a great example of poor etiquette. My mom had a serious medical issue at the beginning of the year. The kind of issue that required a lengthy hospital stay and an even lengthier rehab. A new employee at my job started about three or four months ago and she was informed about my mother. Since then, she constantly asks me about her. Now, I know she is just trying to be nice, but it goes too far. She doesn’t just take the answer I give her. Oh, no. She starts to pry with follow up questions. “How is she walking”, “How is her speech?”, and the humdinger of them all, “how are her bowels?”. This is not a joke. She actually asked that. I’ve known this woman for about a minute and she asked me how my mom’s bowels are doing. There is never a time when that question should ever come up, at work or outside of work. This is an example of what not to do.

Since we are on the undesirable topic of bowels, I think it goes without saying that there needs to be a set of rules for the bathroom. It should go without saying, but judging by the shape that the bathrooms are in and the blatant misuse by the pigs that use them, it has to be said. When you were a child and your parents were teaching you how to properly use a toilet, I can only assume that neither of them instructed you to just throw your paper products on the floor after you use them. If they didn’t teach you that its wrong, then CPS should have taken you away from your parents. We are all adults in the workplace. What that means is that you do not use paper products, no matter what you used them for, and thrown them on the floor. Oh, you accidentally dropped it? Fine. Pick it up asshole. Wading through feces and mucus covered paper waste is never acceptable. This is not something that is effective as of today. This has always been the case and quite frankly, it is disturbing that this even had to be brought up.

Ok, enough toilet talk. Lets move into the office kitchen. Every morning when I arrive and open the refrigerator to deposit my lunch, I have to weed through a gauntlet of salad dressing bottles, half full bottles of water or soda and plastic containers with slop in them. Take care of your crap. The fridge is not your own personal storage area.

And another thing, think about others when you are packing your lunch. If you are bringing so much food to work that you need to put it in a god damn gym bag, then you are doing something wrong. People need to use that space. If you and your section are having a special party for a coworker, don’t put an entire case of water in the fridge four days prior to the date. I mean, how dumb are you? Space in the fridge is at a premium as it is.

Now that it is lunchtime, after you dig out your neatly packed and considerate to others lunch from the refrigerator, you need to stop and think. If your lunch needs to be heated in a microwave, think long and hard about what you are about to do. If your lunch used to have scales or gills, don’t even think about putting it in the microwave. If you do, you are the official office asshole. Day old, deep fried catfish is never ok. Don’t do it. The same goes for popcorn. I don’t know what kind of wise ass put popcorn in the vending machine, but he needs to be castrated. If you should decide to make microwavable popcorn, stand there and pay attention. It burns quickly and there is nothing worse than burnt popcorn. Scratch that. Your burnt popcorn smell swirling with the smell of your catfish is worse. These actions are unforgivable.

Communication in the workplace is important. We all know that. We have to share information to make the place you work successful. Just like everything, there are acceptable ways of doing this. Before you decide to reply to an email, make sure that what you are about to send really needs to be sent as “Reply All.” The odds are, more times than not, that it doesn’t need to be and here is why. Once you put your two cents in (and that’s usually what the thoughts in the reply are worth), that opens the door for other morons to use the email as a springboard of retardation. Reply All emails like “Right” or “Ok” do not offer anything. If you don’t have information that is going to benefit everyone included in the email, then don’t reply at all. You are totally abusing and misusing the email system.

We just covered how important communication is. We have email, phones and even legs. Do not ever yell from one cubicle to another. It is the equivalent to Reply All and no one wants that. Use your inside voice. Be considerate and walk over to the person and talk. I would say just email the person, but it is very clear that many cannot be trusted with email.

Personal hygiene is something hat should be left at home. I’ve seen more than I care to see of people’s hygiene habits in the workplace. Applying deodorant (thank you, at least), clipping of toenails and even cutting of hair are all things that I’ve seen with my own two eyes at work. Why me? That’s all I want to know. Why do I have to see this? Just to be clear, take care of these things at home!

Just think about things, people. That is all I am saying. Be considerate. There is more to the world than just you so don’t ruin it for everyone else. We are all adults here. I know everyone has been raised differently, but I am fairly certain that none of us were raised by wolves.

Now, let’s brush ourselves off and start fresh in the morning. We can do this. Go team!