May 30th, 2008
They say that you aren’t an expert in something until you’ve made all the mistakes you possibly can. I moved into an office yesterday for the first time after working alone at home for five years. I’ve had big problems sleeping every since college, and combining work and home was not helping. But moving forward, the biggest change in my athletic life in the last couple of years has been learning to find the correct balance with all parts life, which will affect athletic performance. So since work-life tends to be the biggest determining factor in our more general quality of life, I find it necessary to dwell on the subject - hard.
Being a computer programmer, I’ve worked with office environments for ten years. But every time I walk into one I still can’t help but laugh at all those funny little office things that shows like “Office Space” and “The Office” (The British version is by far superior, thank you very much) make fun of. I can safely say that I have a conversation with a fellow skier about this stuff *every* day. You all know what I’m talking about, and it’s called “major culture clash”. When all you think about during the work day is running stairs, rollerskiing, lifting weights, and impromptu time trials (next time, Trond :)), it’s really hard to integrate with a McDonald’s eating, couch surfing, huge car driving, Dilbert worshipping, obscenely overweight professional culture.
What do you have to do about it? Shine as brightly as you can! Come to work well rested, bring a fresh perspective to the grind and by all means necessary lube it up! I say ride your bike to work and sneak tons of emails about your ripped lats to your friends spending the day in some other generic cubie-wart hell hole office building with slanted windows over the entry. Don’t forget the posters of the 2002 one ski Alsgaard ovation so you can have something to model your 5:30-8pm workout after.
The nice thing about all this is that when you get rich and start your own company complete with “Premium Office Space”, you can make it super boring however you want! Considering a team performance metric based on cooperative output and relying heavily on motivation among the individuals, I would:
- remove all cubical walls
- face desks toward each other, utilizing the “buddy system”
- add a shower and quiet room
- place an emphasis on outside windows
- banish outlook express and rely on gmail
- ignore requests for double handicapped spaces
- adjust bonuses inversely to monthly health coverage premium
- encourage work in the office, rest at home
- encourage color
- encourage decoration
While it’s hard to do anything when money’s on the line, a hungry mob is an angry mob, ya dig?
PC Load letter? What the #*$% does that mean?!?
June 1st, 2008 at 11:42 am
i find work environments i’ve been in are improved when you respect everyone there even if they are overweight, couch slugs. likely they have cool interests and passions outside of work that are equally as important to them as training is to us. and once you get to know them – office life is usually better because they become your friends. if you get arrogant and anal towards the work environment and your coworkers that don’t think, live or act like you – that’s going Nazi. and Nazi’s are un-cool dudes. be cool dude.
June 5th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
dude49, you are absolutely right!