Same-Same
Several days a week, I find myself working at a local Panera near my kids’ school. It’s one of the perks of having a flexible job that can be done remotely, as needed. To be clear, the perk here is being able to drop off my kids and then work nearby, not necessarily the working in a Panera. I like Panera, and (not to brag) I am a member of their Sip Club (if you see me endlessly sippin’, just know that I have paid my dues).
But working in any food service establishment is not always conducive to the full-on concentration needed to plug values into spreadsheets or respond to emails from valued colleagues who failed to see the earlier email you sent them already answering their query.
There are loud talkers, there are clubs and cliques, there are the people you have gotten to know quite well who pop by your station and chat, often at an exactly inconvenient time. There are people who are helpful and people who seem to have been dropped out of the back of a bagel truck and are confused as to how the world works. There is weird food and people who fail to clean up after themselves. And the bathroom? Well, let’s just say it does not restore faith in humanity.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s exactly like working in an office. Hi-yo!
Do you ever find yourself
You may have noticed my use of the term “I find myself . . . ” above. I have, well, found myself using that phrase quite a bit lately, and I wonder if it’s a bit of a cop out. In the case above, I often “find myself” in Panera because I drive to a Panera and go inside. I don’t wake up there, confused as to what exactly is going on. If that were the case, I think I would have buried the lead, as they say. Everything else would have been just noise. I can only imagine the literal translation in an interchange with my wife:
How was your day?
Good. I woke up in a Panera, and actually got a lot done!
Wait, what?
Or, I guess I could actually “find myself” in the spiritual/existential sense? Seems even more farfetched than the blackout-and-wake-up-at-a-coffee-shop thing.
In any case, I need to rethink the words and phrases I use. Hopefully, I will more and more find myself doing that. . . well, shoot.
Personally, I’m not so sure
Speaking of potentially misused phrases, I have noticed “It’s not personal” being bandied about lately. It seems to particularly happen quite a bit in the context of business or work. For instance, “When Jim said that your entire team failed in implementing the project, made the company look foolish, and that you are nothing more than a mole rat with a PhD, it was nothing personal.”
Ok, I guess.
While I think work has meaning, I see how there are more important things. And I get the admonition, that it would be wrong to take work challenges too seriously.
But I frankly don’t know that we can fully untangle work life from the personal; I’m not sure that it’s even possible. Many of us spend more waking hours in our professions than we do in any other area of life. And we bring our personality, who we are, as people, into it. As we should - they hired a person, not a soulless, emotion-free machine (in most cases).
More to the point, it seems to give those who have very few social graces a free pass, so to speak. They can hide behind such phrases to justify the fact that being cordial is not among their inventory of life skills.
To be fair, it might be a nice trick if it actually worked. We could add this phrase to ANYTHING and build a consequence-free bubble around us!
“I saw that report you wrote. It’s great. I’m going to tell everyone that I wrote it. Nothing personal.”
“I don’t mean anything personal by this, but you are the reason I’ve had to see a counsellor for the past year.”
“I don’t think I’m going to pay for this bagel and coffee today. It’s not personal.”
“I mean this in only a professional sense, but sometimes when you heat up your lunch in the breakroom, I find myself wishing I were never born.”
I DO mean this personally: thank so much for taking the time to read this. Here’s hoping your day is a great one, no matter where you find yourself!