What Would Durkheim Think? [1]
     Basically, I'm a bureaucrat. I spend my day indoors, working at a desk, researching things and fielding questions from around the world. It's a good day-job, pays well, and has the added benefit of not being supervisory, so I don't have to deal with the endless puerile nonsense so many of today's so-called adults bring to the workplace with them.


     It's not that I'd like to work in a place like that one above, but to me, work is where I do, well WORK, not where I go to have a social life. Unfortunately, in today's America, socializing is often deemed more important than the work, even though quite often it actually interferes with one's personal life by bringing added stress and distraction. I would (and could easily) work at home, but my current supervisor is old school and believes that if he can see me at my desk, I must be doing something productive, whereas if I were working at home, he wouldn't be able to 'feel' the joy of running his little kingdom, or verify my workage. It's kind of like the difference between playing with a handful of quarters and having thousands in the bank. The latter is better, but doesn't give you the same sense of having.

     As to the value of working at home vice the office, I am just not as productive at the office as when I work at home. Aside from the routine sine-wave flow of work, calls, e-mails, and meetings, the constant interruptions by people who are between tasks and free to socialize are a domino-effect productivity killer. Bob strolls over to visit Mary, who was being productive up to that moment, but now isn't. Afterward, Bob returns to his work or strolls on to distract someone else, but Mary has decided now's as good a time as any to get a snack, and stops by Fred's desk on the way to see if he wants to go for coffee, and Lou in the next cube leans over to ask if they want company, and so on until before you know it, the entire little herd has become restive and several paid hours are thereafter lost to socializing. All because Bob was bored or lonely, and like a pebble plopped into a pond, disturbed the entire placid ecosystem, utterly unsettling the happy, contented flow of nature. For everyone except someone like me, that is, who, with noise cancelling headphones on, ignores the interruptions, declines to go for coffee, doesn't smoke (or 'vape'--how stupid a habit is that to take up?)[2], and so on.

     The problem now, of course, is that I'm labeled antisocial, grinch, unhappy, troubled, or the person most likely to go postal. No kidding; some office flitterby got offended once because I suggested somewhat snappishly that she needed to go do what she was getting paid to do and not spend so much time organizing fruit-basket raffle sales to subsidize the cost of the annual office 'holiday gala-boredom-fest.' I must have snarled or scowled really hard because she immediately shared that with several other pouty-lipped 'mean-guy haters' and personality-deficients and voila, I'm tagged a homicidal maniac-in-waiting. Seriously? As if I'd do violence rather than ask the boss to deal with the problem, or if worse came to shove, rather than just quit? Idiots.

     Which brings me to something I wrote after one particularly virulent outbreak of seasonal social-itis a while back. I was going to send it to ALL via office e-mail, but the part of me that likes having a job overruled the part that detests stupid, annoying coworkers, so I didn't send it.  I still wish I had, and I might yet in some morphed form when I'm about to retire. In the meantime, I decided to post this here in the hope that it might somehow seep into the American office worker's psyche and, eventually, our workplaces will become places of work again and less like high school home-rooms the month before prom night.

I Don't Really Care if you like me.
     As hard as it may be to believe, some people just really don't see the point of all the social glue that keeps people genial and connected. Even when they do see the point, it doesn't necessarily follow that they want to be part of all that, or that they benefit from it. For some people (more than most people realize, actually), engagement with other humans can be stressful and exhausting, even during the most superficial interactions, say over a coffee in the snack bar. I'm one of those people. In fact, for those who know what it means, I am a strong INTJ on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) index (also known affectionately as the Myers-Briggs Asshole Index). For those who haven't a clue, that pretty much just means I generally don't care about the things most people care about and I prefer my company to yours most of the time.

     This is not the same thing as being a misanthrope. I don't hate people, you all just wear me out. I tend to be congenial and I can be amicable when I have to, but mostly I am very much an introvert who prefers to eat alone, drive long distances without listening to the radio or any other external voices, and is very much happier at 2am than at 2pm (unless I happen to be alone somewhere at 2pm). I enjoy social gatherings well enough, but from the periphery (the fewer people, the better), and I cringe inside when forced to mingle, or to be center stage. My favorite day at the office is when everyone else is out, which is why I don't take leave on the Friday before a long weekend, but almost always on the day following one. I would be a terrible ant, like the discontented fellow named Z in the animated movie, An Ant's Life or Bugz or whatever.[3]



No! No! A Thousand times No![4]
     And so, for those of you who just can't understand or abide that some people just don't want to participate in your soul-sucking vapid little group-gropes, here's notice:




     I could, of course, also go on about bathroom clean-up-after-yourself etiquette, washing one's own dishes, coffee-fund cheating, actually getting trash into the trash cans, storing damp gym clothes under your desk (or worse, wearing them at your desk until you cool down!), science projects in the fridge, fossilized exploded food in the microwave, and so on, but that's mostly about being a decent coworker, which a lot of you just aren't. Suffice to say, that sort of ill mannered office behavior is as off-putting as all the rest, but after 60+ years, I've learned that some folks really can't be trained any better than a pet hamster. Sad, but true.

     As for me specifically, if there is any doubt about whether I would like to share in the group fun, just go ahead and assume the answer is always "No, thank you." I don't mind being left out, not knowing some bit of gossip, or missing out on the holiday fun.  Honest.  We work together. We're not family and we're probably not friends and, truthfully, I'll most likely forget many of you within six months after I leave. Such is life, eh.


P.S.  Did you catch the part where I said I really hate being touched by anyone for any reason? Basically, if you don't have my explicit permission (meaning you actually asked), keep your hands and other body parts to yourself!  This includes hugs, pats on the back, shoulder squeezes, neck rubs, fist bumps, high fives, elbow pokes, commiserating shoulder nudges, euro-fake kissy-face greetings, and overlong handshakes! This is not a joke and I don't take well people testing the waters to see if I'm serious. Trust me, I am, and you may not like my reaction.


Notes:

1. David Émile Durkheim 1858–1917, French sociologist, social psychologist, and philosopher commonly known as the father of modern sociology. Focused on modern social structures.

2. If you smoke, you stink afterwards, and when you come back into the building, you leave bad air in your wake and you stink up the workplace. If you spray yourself with perfume or the like, you just smell like perfumed cigarette stink. Really. After some cigars, some of you smell like a dog that's rolled in a dead snake.

3. It was Antz, which came out just a short time before A Bug's Life.

4. No! No! A Thousand Times No!! is a 1935 Fleischer Studio animated short film, starring Betty Boop.

5. I actually have a pretty decent sense of humor, but none at all when it comes to harassment, violence, hate, or other people's misfortunes. I stopped seeing the humor in cruelty decades ago. My daughter taught me that.

6. My favorite pets are ceramic or carved stone animals and bendy-rubber Chex cereal cow bowl spoon friends.

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     In June of this year, one of my sisters' teenage sons was married. I wrote a short letter of advice to the newlyweds that might be useful to other young people who are just starting a life together, and so to that end, I've included here a copy of the original. It has been edited only for anonymity and to correct a few errors of grammar and style. Please feel free to share it with others.



     Minor changes were made to this essay on 6 Dec 09

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     I'm a bit of a sap for inspirational stuff that is actually inspirational, as opposed to all of the purely inane crap out there masquerading as inspiration that just makes my teeth itch --like this tripe. In fact, I collect aphorisms, apothegms, adages, axioms, quotes, and all manner of humorous or intriguing inspirational sayings, taglines, and rules for life. Many of my favorites appear as random quotes at the top of my webpages, or as the titles of some of my essays, or in the occasional placard I print and pin to the wall where I work.

     Of course, most really clever, original, and thought-provoking stuff is found only rarely, usually buried in the detritus and dross of larger works or collections, but a long time ago I read an article in Wired magazine in which eleven pretty decent 'rules' were offered up all at once (shown here in a copy of the original poster). I've kept a modified and occasionally added-to copy of the rules ever since I first read them, and I came across them again recently while writing about Desiderata. Although I did remember finding the rules in Wired, I didn't remember when, or anything about the authors of the rules, so I did some research to see what I could (re)learn.

     The article was published in 1994, and the rules were described as being part of the OSC Manifesto, which articulated the basic business philosophy of a small West Coast music tech company that literally revolutionized the digital music industry. I didn't care for all of the rules, so I kept what I liked and created my own poster, which I've added to whenever I've felt the urge. I've also played around with fonts for the pure fun of it. My version, based on the foundation laid by the fine anarchists at OSC is below. Enjoy.


 

Information Sources:

- The Wired article about the people who created the OSC Manifesto (OSC = Our Stinking Company) and the revolution in music production that it inspired is well worth reading. It can be found at:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.12/osc.html

Links updated 11 Oct 20.

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     Since my teens, I have had a copy of Desiderata hanging on a wall where I lived or worked, or stashed in a file folder with other favorite essays, articles, and poems that I would occasionally sift through. Recently, however, I realized I hadn't read or even thought about Desiderata for a couple of years, and rather than wait until I got home to dig through my file cabinet, I ran a web search to find a copy (nothing is so about instant gratification as the internet, eh?). A score of links were listed, but the one that caught my eye did so because the subtext surprisingly claimed that Desiderata was "written by Max Ehrmann in the 1920s" and that it was "not found in Old St. Paul's Church," dated 1692. The age and consequently presumed universality of the text were part of what I always found so appealing and inspiring about the prose poem, so I had to see what that was all about.

     It turned out that Desiderata, which is Latin for 'desired things,' was written circa 1927 by a man named Max Ehrmann, and that the Old St. Paul's Church source-note had been mistakenly applied years later. This was almost as big a letdown as when I learned that James Herriot was a pseudonym, but in the end it changed nothing, really. For me, the aphorisms of Desiderata are as meaningful and as calming today as they have always been, and I still turn to it whenever I find myself in need of some general-purpose 'fatherly' advice or a reassurance that 'this too shall pass.' It may sound silly, but except for the wisdom that can be found in some religious texts, Desiderata is as close to a perfect instruction guide for life as I've come across, and every time I read it, I find something new in it; a new connection is made, or a new way of seeing things is revealed, and I am rejuvenated. Given the stress and strain of our times, and the uncertainty of the future, I thought it seemed appropriate to share it here. If you've read Desiderata before, I hope it will provide a bit of welcome nostalgia. If you haven't, then I am pleased to introduce it. In either case, there is real tranquility and soul in Ehrmann's words, which are no less authentic for having been written in the 1920s. Peace.
 


 
 

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