15 Signs You’re Living With Your Coworkers

Photo credit: Waag Society
Photo credit: Waag Society

I’m a stay-at-home mom with two preschool-aged kids. Many are the days I miss working in an office and the camaraderie of adult coworkers. Are you like me? Do you miss those extra hours of personal space, mature conversation, and the sweet solitude of private urination?

Well, tough luck, because those priceless gems are found only in an office.

But, if you’re truly mourning sharing the daily grind with all your old work mates, brush away those tears because that is something you can regain!

Get ready to shuffle some paper, slap the printer around, and say, “I’m right on top of that, Rose!” because I’m here to tell you that all it takes is a little imagination and suddenly you’re back with your work chums in the fast-paced world of the professional office.

Those coworkers you miss?

They’re with you right now.

Unreliable. Do not hire!
Unreliable. Do not hire!

Don’t believe me? Grab your mug from that team-building retreat where your boss cried on the ropes course, take a seat on the couch, and tell me these work folks aren’t living right under your own roof:

1. The one who always asks for a potluck and names 15 dishes she’d love to eat, but come potluck day, she contributes zero dishes and spends the duration of the potluck—that she requested—complaining that “everything looks disgusting.” This person also uses a personally offensive amount of napkins and drinks ketchup when unmonitored.

2. The sexual harasser who pinches your bottom, asks how big your boobs are, and aggressively whispers, “I’m going to rub my penis on the wall!” Ninety-nine percent of the time the behavior of this person will escalate until he follows you into the bathroom to ask if he can watch you pee.

3. The one who wants to have conversations while you’re peeing and refuses to acknowledge your vocal or facial cues of anger and annoyance. This person will never respect your privacy. Machiavelli wrote a book about this.

4. The one who tells other people that you’re pregnant when you’re definitely not pregnant and you’ve definitely never discussed being pregnant with her.

5. The one who asks if you’re pregnant because “your stomach is looking fatter.” This person has a small vocabulary and low social awareness. This is the same person who will also ask if you’re sick because “your face looks really bad.”

6. The one who has no sense of personal space and has not yet mastered oral hygiene. This person races to sit next to you and always wants to tell you secrets. You’re constantly fearful he is secretly eating cat food.

7. The one who makes you work overtime without compensation (no further explanation needed).

8. The one who demands you complete a project ASAP, only to turn around and demand you immediately complete five additional projects. This person is a micro-manager of the worst sort, asking every 30 seconds why you have yet to complete any of her given projects. You give this person the finger every time her back is turned.

9. The one who doesn’t understand you cannot read his mind and will fly off the handle when he asks you to do something, changes his mind without telling you, and you do not intuit his changes. The good news is that this person typically has a ridiculous angry face that is fun to laugh at.

10. The one who steals your good pens and Post-its, but when you confront her will straight-up lie to your face. This person also gets super angry when the Scotch tape is gone even though she’s the primary tape abuser.

11. The one who is incapable of taking ownership of mistakes, choosing instead to blame-shift and weave elaborate tapestries of bald-faced lies. Though his guilt is completely transparent to everyone around him, oftentimes he will blame his most egregious offenses on you. You’re not certain but believe at least two of his friends are imaginary and one may be just a character on a TV show.

12. The one who constantly talks about either cars or pets but doesn’t realize everybody stopped listening to those stories six months ago. There is no polite way to tell this person to please stop talking or find a new hobby. For her birthday you buy her a book about space exploration, hoping to ignite the spark. It doesn’t take. Everyone mourns.

13. The one who lacks self control of any sort and uses company parties as an opportunity to eat and drink as much as possible, ultimately vomiting in your car and not offering to help clean it up. This person will do this more than once and ruin all your seat belts.

14. The one who has horrible taste in music, but you’re too much of a bleeding heart to confront him about it because music really is personal and you’re not a monster. But his love of Rednex’s “Cotton-Eyed Joe” makes you think about stabbing him.

15. The one who needs constant praise and reassurance that you like her work and she’s on the right track. Sometimes she shows you papers where everything is spelled wrong and some of her lunch is on it and you just say, “Yeah, I’m really proud of how hard you’re working on this,” and let it go. You never tell her, but you throw 70% of her work in the trash.

 

Ashley
Ashley is a back-up dancer for circa 1989 Janet Jackson in her dreams and a mother of two preschoolers in her waking life. An Alamo City native, she spent her college and post-college years in TN, CA and AZ (all lovely states completely incompetent in the fine art of breakfast tacos). After crying everyday in radio sales, working next to a sheep pen at a rural telecom, being totally confused in agriculture, and completely giving up and drawing cartoons of co-workers at an online university, she finally found her calling in grant writing for a non profit arts organization. And then her husband (who, no joke, watches college football for a living) was like, “Hey! We can move to San Antonio to be closer to your family if you want to!” And then Ashley was like, “Hey! That’s good timing because remember all that drinking I was doing last week because I thought I had really bad PMS and wanted to power through it? Well, that PMS is a baby!” So they moved to S.A. and Ashley found a job with a rural non profit, but when she tried to go back to work after the baby, living on no sleep with a newborn and a traveling husband unable to share in the workload, she quickly learned she was about five seconds away from a mental breakdown. Cut to today where she is a full time mom, loving the freedom to run all over the city each day with her kids, despite a 98% decrease in her ability to pee alone/do less than 19 loads of laundry each week. She chronicles her most embarrassing childhood moments and photos at This is Me at 13-ish (http://meat13.tumblr.com), in hopes that she never forgets that as difficult as it is to be a parent, it is just as much of a struggle to be a kid.

4 COMMENTS

  1. Hilarious! It’s like Dilbert for SAHM. And that’s my favorite cartoon! Off to go stalk your previous posts now. 😛

Comments are closed.