OFFICE ETIQUETTESLOANE CROSLEY is worried that office behaviour, especially when cubicles are involved, is getting out of hand
WHEN I WAS A little girl, I used to think of public self-maintenance as a form of casual glamour. I had very 1960s ideas about office drawers filled with emery boards and sequined stilettos camped out beneath desks. I watched movies where women steadily applied lipstick and eyeliner in the back seat of jerking limousines. What a high-octane existence the woman who does her hair while walking in front of me must lead, I thought. She’s too busy to stop and brush! But now that I’m an adult and have sat in more than one conference room with women picking their split ends and trimming their cuticles, I have a markedly different impression. I’m all for workplace flexibility, but the merging of personal and public behaviours has gotten out of hand.
I understand the appeal of turning one’s office into an extension of one’s master bathroom. Recently, I started keeping hand lotion and Listerine in my desk drawer, just to make my office environment a few degrees more human. Of course, hand lotion never acts alone. Soon, its friends – mints, lip gloss, lemon-scented antibacterial towelettes – moved in between the binder clips and the note pads. After that, I decided something had to be done about the fluorescent lights above my head; their institutional buzz did nothing to reinforce the illusion that I was in a more relaxing, joyous place – say, a ski lodge where I sat in front of a glowing fire as opposed to a glowing computer monitor. So I purchased a softly bulbed table lamp. And what was the harm in adding a rubber plant and beta fish?
When the plant died – as all plants in my charge inevitably do – I was too lazy to walk the corpse of a terracotta pot to the kitchen and throw it away. Instead, I let it sit on my windowsill for a week, so that every person who came into my office was greeted with the sight of spindly brown sticks, yellow leaves, and a vague odour of organic rot – a stench that seemed all the worse out of context in a corporate building. One morning, I walked in and, finding my senses assaulted, promptly escorted the plant to its burial ground in the kitchen trash. The one thing stronger than the scent was the fear: the fear of being the person in the office who imposes her need for personal comfort on to someone else’s need for boundaries.
There was a woman in an office where I used to work who did everything but sleep there. Although sometimes I was convinced she did that, too. She practised yoga in the hall at the lift and washed her face in the bathroom, where she put out an economy-sized Tiger Balm with a sign that read “For that dry winter skin”. I scowled at these sights. Then I felt instantly guilty for doing so. What was so terrible about her sense of consideration and community? How was it hurting me when she put area rugs over the built-in office carpeting? So many of her crimes were simply offences against my sense of office etiquette. Take the Tupperware, for example. We’re not talking about leftover Chinese food. She had stocked whole shelves in the communal refrigerator with green liquid that clung to the plastic walls of the container like a wheatgrass milkshake when you shook it. Which, in slow-motion fascination, I did.
Lest you get the impression that I was appalled by her health fanaticism, I will say it was not really the downward-facing-dog or the face-washing that bothered me – it was the fact that she had the foresight to bring her own washcloth, which she hung from her doorknob to dry. It was the smug manner in which she pranced on and off the lift with a yoga mat strapped to her back. I thought we had all made an agreement, a kind of pact of discomfort, when we took office jobs or sat in waiting rooms. It went something like: Listen, this isn’t going to be fun for any of us. Let’s just get through it. When my plant expired and my fish went belly-up, I took it as a reminder of this pact. Home and work were separate for a reason. But here was a woman who absolutely refused to go gentle into that fluorescent light.
And she wasn't alone. Once I became subject to this particular brand of annoyance, I noticed it everywhere. One coworker had an excess of baby photos in her office so extreme, it was as if she worked for an obstetrician. Another kept couch cushions and a bottle of Xanax under his desk in case of a Seinfeld-inspired napping emergency. When I brought this phenomenon up with my cube mate, she commiserated.
“There’s a girl at my gym who gives herself pedicures in the locker room. Full pedicures. The whole place reeks of nail polish remover . . . and feet.”
Towards the end of my stint at that office, I walked into the ladies’ room to see my Soylent Green-chugging coworker with an old cassette player balanced between the sinks. In her typically random fashion, her forearms were covered in soap and she had accumulated a pile of wet paper napkins. As I walked past her to the toilets I thought, well, at least the thing is unplugged. Then I wondered if she wasn’t making some kind of art installation out of office supplies. Perhaps she would hang found objects from her ceiling using paperclips and paint them with the green goop she kept in the refrigerator. This seemed as likely an explanation as anything else.
I was exiting the stall when my cube mate walked in. She had the same reaction as me, except more pronounced. The stereo-washer was forced to explain. Apparently, she had found the thing in a dumpster behind our building and was trying to clean it so that she might use it in her office.
Oh fantastic, I thought, anticipating The Best of Mongolian Monk Chantsstreaming down the hallway. But as I watched her methodically scrub between the play and pause buttons, I thought perhaps she had seen the same movies I had, the ones where women applied lipstick in limos. Instead of translating that behaviour to lamps and Listerine, she got her kicks washing dirty electronics in the sink. As strange as I found this, I had to admit: the cassette player came from the same mental store where I had purchased my hand lotion and mints. So when I finished washing my hands, I grabbed an extra stack of paper towels.
“Here,” I said, “looks like you could use these.” She accepted them, leaning towards me with a sudsy hand.
“Thank you,” she rolled her eyes. “Hope this thing works. You gotta do what you can to make yourself comfortable, right?”
Sloane Crosley is a New York book publicist and the author of How Did You Get This Number, a collection of essays published by Portobello Books this month, €12.99