Oh, Nicole loves advice, you can never have too much of it. Both questions for Aunt Acid this week are about the workplace, but since we have a brand-new workplace advice column in place, you should feel free to ask Aunt Acid a variety of non-work related questions at [email protected] at any time.
Dear Aunt Acid,
I enjoy my job and I like working hard, but one part of employed life really gets me down: I struggle to connect with my co-workers, while they all seem to have found their cliques. The ones I supervise see me as uptight (as far as I can tell); the ones who supervise me aren’t that friendly. I feel stuck in the middle, with few confidantes on either side. Sometimes at a happy hour my anxiety dissipates; but day to day, I feel awkward–saying the wrong thing, not getting other people’s jokes, taking things seriously that everyone else seems to laugh at. I know my co-workers aren’t necessarily going to be my friends, but I’d like to think I could feel better about interacting with them. It almost feels like I should live in another country, where workplace mores come more naturally to me. Am I describing a person with situational social anxiety? Or should I just get over it?
Signed,
Lonely from 9 to 5
Dear Lonely,
Pop-culture has raised many of us to believe that we can have, and perhaps even deserve, a well-paying, challenging, stable job with benefits, wisecracking but good-hearted colleagues, and a gruff or neurotic, maybe, but fundamentally competent and admirable boss who properly gauges our value. When you think about it, that is a tall order, especially since we often wander out of college and through the double doors of the working world into scenes of fluorescent-lit horror replete with the kind of screaming mismanagement and corrupt idiocy that would surprise Hieronymus Bosch, although not Jean-Paul Sartre. He knew that Hell is (working with) other people.
At that point it is not useful for folks to tell us, when we look to them for help, that work is not supposed to be fun, that we are lucky to have jobs, there are children starving in Africa and so on. What we do for money makes up 40+ hours of our lives each week and a similarly large chunk of our personal identities, especially in a city like New York. Besides, we want what we were led to expect, dammit: the lady in the living room and the whore in the bedroom—professionally speaking.
What do we do, as mature if disillusioned young professionals? We compromise. Maybe we sacrifice some of the salary or benefits a large corporation can offer to fit in better at a small non-profit; or more challenging work for more accommodating hours; or a sane boss for better coworkers. Except please don’t make that particular trade. Whether or not your boss is a whirling dervish makes the most substantial difference in your quality of life.
The best you can expect from an office is 80% happiness, and even to get to 75% is pretty spectacular. They do not teach us this at school but they should. If you feel like, despite the occasional awkwardness at the water cooler, you’re near 80%, try to recalibrate what you want out of your relationships with your co-workers; figure out how to be satisfied with who they are as opposed to who you would want them to be. Maybe choose one or two you think have extra potential and cultivate them individually, in the office and out.
If you are only 60-70% happy, examine your options. After all, we’re not guaranteed happiness, but we are guaranteed the right to pursue it. Apply elsewhere. (You should probably be doing that anyway.) Maybe you’ll land in a place with great co-workers and different drawbacks that bother you less—or at least offer the benefit of novelty.
Love,
Aunt Acid
*
I found a $20 bill on the floor of my office’s communal ladies’ room. There was no one else in the bathroom, and I hadn’t seen anyone exit in the couple minutes before I entered. There are probably 20 women on my floor, and a woman who cleans the bathroom, though not around the time I found the money. Should I keep the money? And if so, do I have a moral obligation to spend it in a certain way?
The Conservative Answer: What are you, crazy? Keep the money! You found it, it’s yours. Buy yourself some common sense, you hippie.
The Liberal Answer: Someone needs that $20 more than you do. Put it back where you found it and hope that the next person who comes across the money is on the janitorial staff and not from the CEO’s office.
The Charles Schwab Answer: Invest it. Put it towards retirement so that you don’t have to spend the last decades of your life wading through fountains looking for coins.
The Buddhist Answer: The happiness of ownership (atthisukha) cannot compare to the happiness of sharing one’s wealth (bhogasukha). As the Buddha said, “Grass is to be sought for by those in need of grass. Firewood is to be sought for by those in need of firewood. A cart to be sought for by those in need of a cart. A servant by him who is in need of a servant. But in no manner whatsoever do I declare that gold and silver be accepted or sought for.”
The Talmudic Answer: The money is yours, but it would be best if you acknowledge your unearned good fortune by spending it on others, perhaps by buying a friend lunch, says Hillel. Is the friend Jewish? says Shammai. Does it matter? says Hillel. It might matter to her mother, says Shammai. Especially if the friend is a boy. (The halacha is in accordance with the House of Hillel.)
The Simpsons Answer: “Aw, twenty dollars? I wanted a peanut.”
*
Illustrator: Liana Finck’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Lilith, Tablet, and The Forward. Her first graphic novel is called A Bintel Brief. Her webcomic, Diary of a Shadow, can be read on her website.
Tags: advice, aunt acid, etiquette, human decency, money, work
Related Posts
Aunt Acid: Advice About Sisters
She Said, She Said: Advice on Yappy Coworkers and Being Poorer Than You Want
Raising the Tone: Etiquette for Accepting Apologies and Acknowledging Loss
Raising the Tone: Etiquette for Overdue Apologies and Un-Accepting Invites
Raising the Tone: Etiquette for Resentment and Bachelor Parties
“Is This Working?”: Advice On Promotions and Leaves of Absence
LW1: decide if it’s worth moving companies, then act accordingly.
LW2: KEEP IT.
Aw yea, first comment.
I get really weird when I find money! It is an Ethical Dilemma.
The rules I have come to are this, and they are by no means perfect or what you SHOULD do, just what I have found I can do while easing my conscience.
– When at work: Hand it to management, with my name. If no-one claims it, spend it freely and without guilt. But, then I did retail, so it may be a customers money.
– Not at work: Under about £15? Spend freely and without guilt. Over? Hand it to the police, with my name and number.
– In a wallet? Hand to the police, or mail it back to the owner.
In all circumstance: ask around. Is this yours? Did you drop this?
do you really think the police aren’t going to just take the money?
Well, legally they aren’t supposed to. In fact, in the UK, they are supposed to keep in in a special place for six months, and then if it’s not claimed, return it to the person who gave it in.
This has, in fact, happened to me with a £50 note.
That’s amazing! Perhaps cops in the UK are nicer/more law-abiding than their NYC counterparts.
It might just be where I live. The met are AWFUL. But my local police service are very good. The vast majority seem to genuinely want to help and protect people!
( I handed in a £50 note and 6 months later got a phone call going ‘no-one came in and claimed it, do you want it’, so as I was about 18 and deeply impoverished I said ‘yep!’ and I picked it up from them, showing ID, and went and spent it on shoes)
Always the shoes! It’s been said but for the Grace of God, I could very well be found living in a dumpster under the Granville Street viaduct. However true that may be, one thing’s for certain: I’d have fab shoes to propel me around town.
I once found $90 while working a terrible job in a movie theater and it was tragically claimed 15 minutes before we closed . That guy was super relived though so I only 40% regretted it.
I recently dropped $20 somewhere and while I am lucky that I can spare it (at least kind of ), it still sucked. So I would be glad to get it back, which means someone’s gotta be the person to return it. I try to be that person when I find cash.
Man if I hand a $20 to management management is just gonna have $20 in extra walkin’-around money. If it’s not somewhere occupied by under around a dozen possible candidates and it doesn’t have a name attached to it I don’t even see a hypothetical where that cash is making its way back to the original owner (or, in the technical parlance, the “loser weeper”)
Yeah, if I found money in my office (a significant amount, not, like, a dollar), I’d pass it on to HR or reception, who’d email around that money had been found (without specifying an amount), if it’s yours, come claim it, blah blah…and If no one claimed it, hopefully I’d get to keep it.
I’ve seen those emails sent in my office fairly often – I guess people tend to be good citizens about that sort of thing. (Except those demons who steal food from the fridge or use my mug!) All I know is if $20 fell out of my pocket, I’d really, really hope someone turned it in to HR. That’s a lot of money to me 🙁
(Except those Mallories who steal food from the fridge or use my mug!)
There, fixed that for you.
My mug is so disgustingly tea and chapstick stained that I pity the person who tries to use it.
I could have written the first letter and partially as a result am going through career counseling to see if not only should I switch jobs but careers as well. I’ve always believed you don’t switch jobs just because of office politics b/c there will be new office politics wherever you go but really I spend too much time at my job to feel all the time like I missed out on some key bonding experience that would make me feel like I fit in here. sigh
I’m at the point where I need to switch careers (I HATE what I’m doing) – I’d be interested to hear your experiences with career counseling.
It’s been really interesting so far. I had started by going in to just punch up my resume but after the initial visit realized that maybe I needed a bigger discussion.
I’ve never been one to go for touchy feely crunchy stuff but I’m learning about myself as well as somehow adding to reasons why I need to leave my current job. I’m doing something that goes through the 4C’s – Congruence, Content, Conditions & Culture and Compensation. I’m on Content right now. Congruence looked at motives, life goals. I had to have 3 other people fill out a form for me to assess my skills that was eye opening since I used two former co workers and my current boss.
I’ll need to consider how open I am to going back to school. Right now my current position technically is a good fit for me except in a couple of areas that aren’t really about the work but the culture at work. I’ve come to understand the culture better through this process. And I’ve also starting more seriously thinking about things I always thought would be interesting to do but ended up not doing for one reason or another. I guess though really the proof will be in whether I’m either in a better job or working towards one b/c I need schooling in a years time.
Yeah, culture is a real thing, and office politics vary WIDELY.
Office politics is always there wherever you go but there’s definitely a clear line between totally ignorable/actually pleasant, minor annoyance, and utterly intolerable. Where that is may vary for certain people, but Christ I miss my old coworkers who mostly didn’t give a shit about each other and were just there to work and get paid and not get in each others’ way now.
LW1: I think it’s a mistake to assume that you can be friends with your supervisors and those who you supervise. (Emphasis on assume; it can happen.) Although you may think those who you supervise see you as uptight, keep in mind that they see you as their supervisor and therefore someone who has power over them on the job (even if you don’t feel this way and think you are being very, very nice to them, you are still their boss!). Being friends with someone you supervise can be tricky because some day you may have to make a tough decision and hold someone accountable, and even if it’s the right decision, will the friendship be able to survive it?
You supervisors may see you as their employee and may want to maintain a certain boundary because ultimately these are professional relationships first and foremost.
To Lonely: You feel stuck in the middle because you are; that’s one of the bad things about middle management. (I’m joking, all the things about middle management are bad.) You can’t be as friendly with your subordinates as you can with your peers unless you are a bad supervisor who cares more about being liked than about getting good work out of people. I am that bad supervisor and I know what I’m talking about here. And your own supervisors feel the same way about you, if they’re responsible people.
I sympathize and it isn’t asking too much to want to feel like people like you, but there is a barrier between you and them that has nothing to do with your personality or anxiety, isn’t your fault and probably isn’t a bad cultural thing even. also, sometimes it feels like sucking up to be too friendly to your boss, or risky to expose too much of your real personality to her, so your subordinates may be holding back for reasons that are completely not personal.
LW1: my situation is not that bad, but I also feel left out at work sometimes. I’m the most recent hire in a team where the next least senior person has been here for 5 years, and I have a short-term contract. My colleagues are very nice, but they already have such a strong rapport that I feel like the office third wheel. They know each other’s kids. They’re all older than me and at a different stage in life. We’ll go out to lunch and they’ll talk about the best type of heat pump for in-ground pools or what summer camp to send little Sally to or does anyone know a good mechanic in the area? And I just sit there with nothing to contribute to the conversation because I don’t intend to be a homeowner any time soon, I never intend to be a parent, and I don’t have a car. It’s awkward.
LW2: Send out an all-staff email and ask the rightful owner to provide the serial number on the bill as proof.
I went out for drinks with some of the lawyers at our firm, and even the young ones just talked about their children and also golf.
I had to go for lunch with a couple of senior people in my department once, and it went similarly. They had a very very long conversation over figuring out what to do with all their extra money once they maxed out their contributions to all their RRSPs/tax-free savings accounts/etc. I can safely say I have never had and probably never will have that problem.
Wait, do you know the serial number of all the bills in your wallet?
LW2 – we got an evil genius here
CONFESSION: Last weekend I WITNESSED a $5 bill fall out of a bro’s bag while he was frolfing at my neighborhood park. I picked it up, looked at him frolfin’, looked at my misandrist wife, looked back at him A MAN, he A MAN looked at me, and I went
¯_(ツ)_/¯ and pocketed the fiver.
Later, we bought doughnuts with it.
So what I’m saying is, LW2, try harder to steal a man’s money next time. You’re off to a good start, though!
I LOST $20 a while ago at work in a bathroom in the public sector of my work (in a museum). I went back immediately and it was gone. I tried going to security to ask if anyone had turned in any cash and they just laughed at me. They said, “even if it was turned it, how can we ever prove who really lost it?”
I feel like it’s actually a good thing if the people you supervise see you as a little uptight? I mean, you want to be open enough that they can come to you with work-related problems, but you also need them to take you seriously, and unfortunately a lot of people can’t do that if they think they’re friends with you. But that also can be really shitty if most of the people at work are subordinates who you shouldn’t be friends with or supervisors who shouldn’t be friends with you, so if you find a place with less structure or with more people you don’t have those relationships with, go for it.
In spite of the dismissive rationalization I wrote above, I do think that different workplaces tend to attract radically different types of people, and if you don’t like the type of person that tends to work in your office, you are totally justified in making that your primary reason for leaving and a big consideration when looking for a new job. I used to work in used bookstores and I do love all the maladjusted creeps who do that. to this day I miss that co-worker pool, even though it was a pool that included a tax evader, a non-bather and at least one literal nazi. Office people are easier to deal with because they are more predictable and their motivations are clearer, but I feel pretty blah about them.
So If you don’t like office politics and office people, get a job in a different milieu and see how you like it; it’s not true that people are the same the world over and it can be really different. Of course that is ten million times easier said than done.
That Talmudic answer is so spot on it makes me wonder if you are actually a Talmudic scholar. Applause all around!
Also i’m a huge dork because my mind immediately jumped to the real talmudic answer (which is surprisingly close to what you’ve written here, except that you also have to leave a note saying money was found and give people a chance to claim it)
The Rabbinics teachers from my 13 years of Jewish Day School would be pleased to hear you say so.
One time I found $200 on the floor of my favorite bar. I was a broke college student & my friends told me I would be crazy not to keep the money, but I felt too guilty. I trust the owner of the bar, so I handed it over to him. I figured I’ve gotten way more than $200 worth of comped drinks over the years, so even if it ended up with him I wouldn’t be too upset. Plus, I slept way better that night than if I had kept the cash.
$20 can buy many peanuts.
Explain how!
Money can be exchanged for goods and services.
Husband and I say this to each other, at minimum, weekly.
Ah, the last peanut. Dripping in the oil and salt of his departed brothers.
Wait a minute…something’s wrong.
::rummages under couch::
OW! Pointy! Eww, slimy! Uh-oh, moving!
I was just coming to say MONEY CAN BE EXCHANGED FOR GOODS AND SERVICES but I see I have been beaten to the punch.
I found $40 on the street late at night on an empty block. I was going to keep it, but it’s San Francisco, which means there’s someone homeless within 50 feet of you at all times. I gave it to the next man I found sleeping on the street and he started crying and so I started crying and I got to feel awesome for FREE since I can’t afford to just hand out $40 all the time.
I have mostly stopped trying to have work friends since the last three people I have friend-courted with, “You seem nice, let’s go to happy hour” have spent that time, which I think of as friend-first-date, ie you tell your funny stories and minimize your closet monsters have instead told me their deep life traumas or specious lies, ranging from “The Time I Was Homeless In Hawaii” to “My Mom is A Narcissist and My Dad is A Gambler” to “The Time I Almost Had A Threesome With Jay-Z And My College Girlfriend-Not-Girlfriend.”
In other news, Ester Bloom! I dated one of her college friends after college who always said really nice things about her, I always wished we could have brunch. This was before she got internetfamous.
WAIT WHAT also i am *always* available for brunch
yes! I dated logan in Seattle in 2007! you always sounded incredibly charming.
Office bathroom $20: give it to an admin who will send an email about it and the person who lost it can claim it. Geez people!
LW1: Congratulations, you are a governess! You are not part of the family, because you are a servant, but neither are you a regular servant who should hang out with the other servants, since you spend so much time with the children (and we don’t want them getting to servant-y!).
Are there perhaps people in your level in other departments that you could befriend?
When you put it that way, it’s clear her next step is to marry the CEO and revel in her new hierarchical superiority.
She had style, she had flair, she was there,
That’s how she became the Nanny.
*high-five*
I thought of that instantly, but I read too much Georgette Heyer.
Bite your tongue! No such thing as too much Heyer.
(What’s your favorite? I could read Frederica every week)
Ooh, Frederica’s a good one. I am currently rereading Venetia–Good Girl finds her inner Bad Girl and lives Happily Ever After narratives really speak to me. (My favorite LMM is The Blue Castle, so.) Also books with Quotation Contests.
All-time favorite Heyer might be Venetia, or it might be The Talisman Ring or The Grand Sophy, except I always have to skip that one really awful scene in TGS with the money-lender. It is not in my Head Canon.
I haven’t read The Talisman Ring, will check it out.
Totally agreed on The Blue Castle, and Venetia! Another great Heyer in a similar-ish vein is The Black Sheep. And URGGH yes that one scene in The Grand Sophy! I adore Heyer as an author but based on scenes like that and some of her letters I don’t think we would have Got Along in real life.
Lonely from 9-5: Anyone you supervise will feel awkward around you; and anyone who supervises you will also feel awkward (if they don’t, they possibly have terrible boundaries). Solution? Make friends in a different department.
*uncontrollable Jewess cackling at the Hillel/Shammai joke*
I am really good at finding money! I think it’s because I am easily visually distracted and have to look at the ground when I walk or I trip. I once found $20 in the ocean and told the lifeguard, who was pretty much just, “Yeah, you can keep it, nobody is going to claim their ocean-money.”
And once I found a joint on the ground of the restaurant where I worked in high school! In retrospect I definitely should not have smoked that mystery joint, but whatever, I was seventeen.
ETA: this makes me sound like a bad person, but every time I find money there is no way to return it. I was not going to bring $5 to campus security and I am DEFINITELY never going to tell a NYC cop that I found $20 on the ground, any leads???
Tangentially unrelated: one time I was out on a walk with my then boyfriend and we found $60 and three loaves of bread buried in the snow, all in different locations. We were dirt poor at the time and that $60 went to get me new tires and the snow bread kept us satiated for weeks afterwards.
Bless you, snow bread.
I found 2 bucks on the street the other day! I briefly debated… I don’t even know, knocking on people’s doors nearby? But then I used it to buy a burrito.
no ragrets
One time in college, I found twenty dollars on the street. There was no one to be seen so I pocketed it and went on my merry way.
A few days later, I happened to walk through the psychology department. In one of the classrooms they had a monitor set up with a camera feed showing THE EXACT SPOT ON THE STREET where I had found the twenty dollars. I never managed to get a straight answer as to why this setup existed, but I have wondered ever since if I was an unwitting test subject in some nefarious experiment.
Eh, you got $20 out of it.
There was a guy in my hometown who used to sell jewelry at basically any public event involving more than three people. He was known as "Eric the Toe-Ring Guy." He once told me never to smoke a roach I found on the sidewalk, and to this day I never have.
Oh, lord, $20 is half of my walking-around money for a month. Losing it would mean losing $20 worth of beverages, which where I live is a lot of beverages!
Last summer, I found a ten euro note in one of my window boxes. I live on the 5th floor, though, so it was clearly deposited there by a benevolent pigeon, maybe in payment for all the cherry tomatoes its brethren had pecked dry.
I feel like the “omg that person I work with is such a good person and also trustworthy” factor is worth WAY more than $20, so there’s that. I would probably email around or turn it in to reception, and who cares if someone takes it wrongfully, that’s on them, not on me. I am quite mercenary, as it turns out. Anything to keep me ethical!
I'd be right there with you in my Fluevogs! So poor, but SO FAB.
Just want to point out that conflating whirling dervishes with a lack of sanity is a whack move! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufi_whirling)