Many workplaces have rules about eating at your desk. Where there are none, avoid smelly food. Watch out for your colleagues crinkling their noses.
Food that might be all right elsewhere won’t really do in the workplace – fish and chips, burgers, Indian or Chinese takeaway. It’s the smell. It just doesn’t go with the nice clean office smells of computers, paper and rubber plants. Also, it’s all very well when a whole group is chomping through a takeaway, but one person gnashing away on their own isn’t an attractive sight.
Office parties
With the rising tide of money in recent years there have been more and more office parties. Employers think they are providing a treat. Employees do nothing but grumble. ‘Have we got to go?’ ‘I’m not sitting next to her.’ ‘Only sparkling white this year! Cutting back, are we?’ One year Matt was required to organise the Christmas party. He nearly died. It had to be an elaborate event with a theme and a band and entertainment and a seating plan. Nothing else would do. Afterwards, everybody was invited to fill out a questionnaire criticising it to their heart’s content.
‘But research shows,’ says Matt, ‘that if we just gave them vouchers, they wouldn’t feel valued.’
You can’t win.
The anarchy and drunkenness of office parties are legendary. But the inexperienced should be wary. It’s not what it seems.
The classic horror scenario is the younger employees behaving just as they would at their own party, only worse. Telling the boss what they really think of him or her is just the beginning. They will insist on strip poker; if met with general recalcitrance they will take all their clothes off just to make a point and sit on the lap of the most spinsterly of the PAs. This is a prelude to being violently sick and collapsing on the floor.
Senior staff may not behave much better. I heard of one boss who, in his speech, took the opportunity to tell his workforce that they were a useless lot who would be lucky to find their jobs waiting for them when they returned after New Year. Another, who had cleverly seen to it that only very gorgeous young men were employed in the media-planning department, took the opportunity of the Christmas party to snog them all.
If not out of control, you might, like Matt, have trouble thinking of something to say. ‘One year I spent the time discussing how we could reduce paper costs with a colleague.’ This is very bad – talking shop. But suddenly having to wean yourself off this kind of thing and talk to people you think you know well in a different way is disconcerting.
Anarchy at office parties is far more controlled than it appears.
You can get drunk but you should not be incapable.
Don’t be sick.
Don’t make an exhibition of yourself.
Don’t talk shop.
In some cases you need to talk to people as if you’ve never met them before (see Getting to know people: Perfect questions, page 145).
Sex, on the whole, is a mistake.
Drugs should not be taken, unless actually provided by the boss.
Leave it as you found it and Would you do that at home?
At school, teachers always say to the litter bug, ‘Would you do that at home?’ Usually the answer’s, ‘Yes, there’s somebody to pick up litter.’ They mean their mothers. In the workplace the attitude is similar. ‘I’m too grand to tidy/ clear away/remove rubbish. The “cleaners” will do it.’
But watch out – perhaps it isn’t the cleaners who are doing it. Zoe turned the meeting room at her PR agency upside down. She was overexcited. She was leading a little strategy meeting for the first time. She wanted a nonhierarchical arrangement of furniture. But did she put it back how it should have been when she had finished? Guess who was in there next? And who had to put it all back again? That’s right. The managing director. Who snagged her Nicole Farhi skirt in the process.
In Matt’s office, the bugbear is the coffee area. It’s a horrible sight: ring marks everywhere, drips and splashes, coffee powder scattered, unattractive brown lumps in the sugar. Not even cats could get it into this state. ‘Every day someone puts the jug back on the hotplate with just a little bit of coffee left. After a while it evaporates, leaving a sticky mess which is hard to clean. Once or twice the jug’s got stuck to the hotplate and we’ve had to buy a new machine.’
Just because you’re in the office, it doesn’t mean you haven’t got to:
Tidy as you go.
Leave it as you found it.
Is that your mug?
Once again, the workplace wields its mysterious power. Normally upright citizens turn into serial petty criminals at work. ‘I get through one mug a month minimum,’ says Matt. Luckily he’s not one of those office workers who get attached to their mug. But where do they go? Only rarely is there an explanation. A newly arrived boss I know of once threw away a whole cupboard of old, cracked mugs only to find that they were the jealously guarded personal mugs of his new staff. The thief is rarely caught in full possession. In the mug racket they’re shifted on sharpish. In offices where newspapers or magazines are provided, these can be guaranteed to have evaporated by midday. Otherwise it’s pens. ‘You’ve got a lot of pens,’ somebody said to Zoe one day. She had indeed and most of them weren’t hers. Everyone in an office either has so many pens they don’t know what to do or none at all.
If it’s not yours, don’t take it.
Taking advantage
Zoe, still rather green in the PR world, got a call the other day from an out-of-town journalist on a trade paper of some kind. He was coming up to London. Could she recommend a restaurant, perhaps one near her office? Her answer was simple: no, she couldn’t. Other times she has had calls asking about hotels or enquiring if it’s possible to ‘buy’ any of the T-shirts her agency were giving away last summer. It was no again to the hotel and as for the T-shirts, they were £15 each. Her managing director, when she got to hear about this, was at first annoyed but eventually rather admiring. ‘Good for you,’ she said.
Zoe hadn’t really got it. These people were looking for freebies. Matt can tell of similar grasping ways. ‘We’ve had suppliers demanding to be taken to particular restaurants, then, when they get there, commandeering the wine list and ordering expensive wine. Sometimes they cancel at the last minute or take calls all the way through lunch.’
It’s not just clients who behave like this. Junior employees, when taken out by their head of department or equivalent for a welcoming lunch, are often astonishingly quick to order. This is because it doesn’t take very long to find the most expensive thing on the menu, that being the only object. Ideally, it should be twice as expensive as anything else. Senior managers are helpless to stop this practice, but they do call perpetrators ‘lobsters’ after the item they’re most likely to choose. Luckily, Zoe behaved well at her lunch with the managing director. She doesn’t like lobster or really even know what it is.
Customers are at it too. ‘You’ve miscalculated my phone bill by 12p. I want twenty minutes of free calls and a sequined draught excluder.’ Or, in the supermarket, ‘My trolley’s wonky. I want a year’s supply of frozen peas.’ They call it compensation but actually it’s something for nothing.
Stand up to vulgar grasping clients and customers. They know they’re just trying it on. They won’t dare to protest if you refuse to give in to