The other day I was talking to my father and he asked if I had been making any friends at work. I told him most of the people I worked with were a lot older than me, and although they were nice, I didn’t really hang out with them that much. What I didn’t tell him was that I go out of my way not to make friends at work.
Once you start friendships in the workplace, it makes it more difficult to slack off for a number of reasons.
1. Guilt. It’s a lot easier to hang out in the bathroom and surf the internet when you don’t really know much about your manager. Once you know him as a person, you can start to feel bad that you’re not following through on your work and misleading him on your productivity.
2. The more people who stop by your desk, the worse off you are. Once people start to hang out, they ask you what you’ve been working on or, even worse, ask you to help them with some problems they have been having. You could argue that when friends stop by, they distract you from working which is a good thing, but that’s not entirely true. What they distract you from is slacking.
3. Once you become friends at work, people start to expect you to hang out outside of work. Nobody ever asks me to hang out after hours, and that’s the way I like it. When 5 o’ clock rolls around (okay, more like 4 o’ clock) I want out of the office to enjoy my personal life and hang out with my real friends.
4. Money. Friends from work want to go out to lunch with them (which I never want to do). They want to go out for happy hours or Blue Jackets hockey games. You have to buy them gifts when they get married or have children. You need to take them out for their birthdays, when they break up with their significant others, or are just having a bad day. I would rather save up the money and invest it so that one day I won’t have to work anymore.
5. No matter how hard you try to avoid it, the majority of times what do you end up talking to friends at work about? WORK! All I want to do is get away from work, not spend my free time rehashing it.
I’m not against having decent relationships at work, I just try to keep conversations to a minimum and avoid asking any personal questions. It allows me to hang out in my cave for as along as I can.
Technorati Tags: friends, productivity, slacker, slacking, work, workplace humor
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