Welcome, Fellow Office Misfits!

Do you feel that your office job isn’t “you”?

Do you find it hard to relate to coworkers who love talking about “best practices” and seem to find updates to online systems fascinating?

Do some of the challenges of office life – confinement, inactivity, sensory/emotional/intellectual deprivation, disconnection, frustration, overwhelm, toxicity, uncertainty – seem to bother you more than they do other people?

Do you resent having to flush away hours and hours typing nonsense into a plastic box when your real passion is playing the piano, climbing rocks, writing novels, studying Greek, making quilts, or taking care of your own kids?

Do you dread coming to work every day even though you know millions of unemployed would love to have your job?

If so, you’re in the right place. These days, there are lots of us office misfits out there, and this blog is to be a place where we can congregate and share war stories as well as suggestions for coping with an office world that is at once unnatural, undemocratic, ungenerous, and unrelenting. While to our coworkers, a routine office job may represent success, to many of us it represents either failure to succeed at something else we’d rather be doing or dreams being sacrificed for the sake of loved ones who need our support. Consequently, we may feel lonely and isolated at work, which is why we need each other!

I am a person with a long, though intermittent, career as an office misfit. Altogether, between bouts of following my bliss -- writing, music, social work -- since 1970 I’ve spent over fifteen years working off and on as a clerk, secretary, administrative assistant, and editorial assistant for professors and researchers in a major university. The people I’ve worked for have been lovely, universities are fabulous employers, and I’ve always gotten good performance reviews. The only problem was that, until recently, I could barely stand being at the office.

Partly, this was because I had no desire to like my job. Liking office work, I reasoned, might mean I’d forget all my dreams of greener, non-office pastures and stay stuck in a dead-end job forever. In addition, it might mean giving up my creative, nonconformist, freedom-loving personality and morphing into an unimaginative cog-in-the-wheel, and why on earth would I want to do that? So instead of actively creating an office life that felt good to me, I emotionally checked out every time I walked in the door, shifting into a twilight state in which time at the office wasn’t “real,” just something I had to “get through” until I could get back to “life,” which was everything outside of work.

Thus I flushed away huge chunks of quality time through several long tours of office duty. Only in 2006, after I’d spent about a year in my current job as an administrative assistant, did I begin to question my habitual attitude towards office work. This was because I now had an MSW, ten years’ experience as a psychotherapist, and an understanding that attitude is a matter of choice. (I took the administrative job because my husband I could no longer afford private health insurance, the premiums for which had become astronomical, and university benefits are great.) As a trained mental health professional, I knew how unhealthy it was to shut down your feelings for whole days at a time. Thus, I began to do a kind of abbreviated journaling at work to try to pinpoint, for the first time, the specific causes of my dissatisfaction so I could do something about them. As I began to address problems one-by-one, I started feeling better and better, and although I’m still not crazy about office work, I do feel that my work time is now a full-fledged, sometimes even enjoyable part of my life, not just something I have to get through.

Meanwhile, I began to realize that I wasn’t the only person in the world who disliked office work, as evidenced by the popularity of Scott Adams’s Dilbert, the T.V. show “The Office,” and movies like “Office Space.” What was it about the office experience, I wondered, that made it such a downer for so many people? Having already published several books as an MSW, I made it a project to research this question and try to come up with some ideas on how to feel better at work. This made my job a lot more fun, as I could now consider it research! It also resulted in a new book, Making Peace with Your Office Life, which will be released March 16, 2010.

Now the book is finished, and I've realized that it's just a starting point. A book is one-way communication, and what I'd like now is something back: I'd like to know more about how others experience the challenges of office life. Which is why I’m starting this blog, a place where people who define themselves as “office misfits” -- i.e., beautiful swans who are often regarded as ugly ducklings by less imaginative workplace geese -- can share suggestions about how to cope with the challenging realities of the modern workplace. If you’re one of these people, welcome. I look forward to reading your comments, and I can promise you that no one here will be allowed to accuse you of “whining.”

A word of warning: It hasn’t happened much, but a few times someone has actually been fired because of what he or she wrote on a blog. For that reason, I suggest you use only fictitious names for individuals or organizations in your comments. Also, if your employer uses fascistic management methods, you may want to write your comments from home rather than at work.

Coming Next: Office Blues and Office Battleshock – What they are and how to counter them.