Happy "Only Day I Can Get Any Fucking Work Done" Day to All Who Celebrate
Commemorating the holiday after the holiday
When I was in my 20s, I was in a B-plus job and a C-minus marriage, so I usually worked the day after Thanksgiving. I was happy to take one for the team, and positively giddy to avoid spending the day listening to my mother in-law complain that the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade was over-sexualized (she would have only been satisfied when everyone was wearing hazmat suits). The office was eerily calm on those Fridays, with just myself and Brent — a Mormon who discovered that he wasn’t too keen on Mormonism after kid number five — haunting the halls.
I was shockingly productive those days, even after factoring in a 90-minute lunch and analyzing my fantasy football roster like I was translating the Rosetta Stone. And that’s when I realized: I wasn’t inherently dead weight. I had become dead weight due to the ridiculousness of the modern office.
That ridiculousness takes many forms, but the simplest form is email. The email situation in most offices is out of control, and when you add in Slack or Microsoft Teams, the whole situation has become a rampaging beast spawned in the outhouse of hell. Even in my pre-Slack years, I came to dread the last few days of a vacation, because I’d begin to visualize the avalanche of emails that would bury me when I got back. There should be a strict office norm against messages about personal stuff, especially birthdays, pet things, and anything about jogging — emails encouraging people to celebrate your marathon time should be punishable by death. You know how in a World War II movie, a pilot will say “I can’t wait to get home to Skunkbutt Falls,” and his squadron leader will yell back “STAY OFF THE RADIO!!!”? That should be the ethic: necessary communication only. And anyone who can’t figure out the difference between “reply” and “reply all” is too dumb to work in the office and possibly also to live.