A few years ago, a friend of mine lost an in-law. It was a very sad few months of suffering, some of it possibly due to things for which people sue, but in any event, it was not easy for the family. My friend looked to this relative as one of his own; they were very close, and he was very upset by this loss.
A day or so after the funeral, my friend said to me: “it seems weird to say it, but I’m looking forward to going to work Monday. Just to have the usual routine.”
I was reminded of this a few weeks ago, when Indianapolis Colts head coach Tony Dungee took some time away from his team to bury and to grieve for his teenage son James, who apparently committed suicide. Dungee returned after missing about two weeks of the season, and those who took the time to comment on sportstalk radio generally thought it was a good thing, or speculated that Dungee probably felt he needed to come back, to get into the flow of the work (his team had the best record in the NFL last season, but would lose in their first playoff game to the eventual Super Bowl champion, the Pittsburgh Steelers).
We often hear of the cliché that no one says when they die “I wish I would have spent more time at the office.” I wonder if all of us need to examine our workplace relationships more closely. My wife made this observation after hearing this story from our friend, and I’ve thought a lot about it since.
We spend the majority of our waking hours involved in “work” – commuting to work, work at the office, taking the work home (literally and metaphorically), etc. And if we have an environment where we are around the same group of people on an everyday basis, then those people get to know us very well – maybe even better than our family does. These coworkers of ours may not be our friends – some of them we may not even like – but they still know who we are.
At the office, there’s surely someone who knows just how you take your coffee. There’s someone who knows which part of your shoulder hurts. Someone who knows you’re thinking about buying some big-ticket item: an HDTV, a spa vacation, or even an investment property. Maybe that someone is the only one who knows you’re thinking of going for another degree, or for ballroom dancing lessons, or a course in Thai cooking.
I’m not saying this is a bad thing. If anything, we should all be so lucky to have people we can feel that close with. And in some sense the workplace is a middle ground between friendship and family, since you can’t usually choose your co-workers anymore than you can choose your family, yet you can choose which of your co-workers you will be friends with.
I suppose this says a lot about our family situations, that there are many people out there who in fact spend more time at work because their home life is so bad. I can’t tell you how many of my peers have got divorced or are getting divorced in the past ten years. But that’s for another post, another time.
We are always being told by sociologists that most of us have jobs we don’t really like. This may be true, and for sure I would be in favor of working in a world where everyone gets to do what he or she loves to do for a living – you know, live to work instead of work to live. But if that is the case, we’d better begin to understand how workplace relationships, um, “work.” And maybe if we do, we can understand how our family relationships should.