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
February 28th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
I think you are my soulmate.
Happy Slacking!
February 28th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
Couldn’t have said it better myself. You should write a book.
February 28th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
oh give me a break. this post got me m-a-d. don’t get me wrong, i admire that you’re a slacker, (we have a lot in common in that sense) but you, my friend, are an elitist slacker. very smug indeed. seriously, what’s so bad about opening up to your workmates. they are in the same boat as you, you might have more in common with them than you could imagine. if they are in fact quite a bit older, that’s pretty much what you’ll become in a few years anyway unless you get out and your investments really pan out (fingers crossed). are your real friends (if you even have them) that much more interesting anyway? talk to them. open up a bit. it’s narcisistic thoughts like this that really bug me. just my 2 cents.
February 28th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
Let me add some more reasons not to make friends at work.
1. If you go to an event with work friends and decide to call in the next day, you could be fronted out, or they could decide to call in too and leave work shorthanded.
2. If you want to go on a trip with your friends and ask for a week off, it could be harder to get if more than 1 person is out at the same time.
February 28th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Defacto #6 could be the inevitably of having some uncomfortable relations with the opposite sex, or “what’s left to be done in the office after you get the intern preggers”.
February 28th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
In my opinion, work is the central focus of a persons life. What you do for a living and the friends you there partly defines who you are. Work is an important part of your foundation of life.
I find your reasons for not making friends somewhat specious.
1. In addition to having friends at work, I also strive to be a responsible co-worker and do the best job for myself and others whose work depends on my work. I strive to work hard.
2. Despite this, there is a time and place to be a slacker. The water cooler, to me, is the most important cultural exchange points one can have.
3. I love my work; and I trained very hard for what I do at the university. It seems to me, you might need to re-examine what is you want to do in life.
Greg
February 28th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
If you’re actually friends with somebody you’ll probably want to, you know, hang out with them. It really won’t be a burden to have a friend. I promise! Also, friends generally support each other, so I don’t see why you’d have to worry about them “fronting you out”.
If you want a much better work life for yourself, it pays to befriend people who can make good things happen for you at work. I’m not suggesting that you be suck up or become an insincere sycophant, but at the same time you’re not going to gain any allies by being anti-social.
Finally, it still helps to make friends even if you’re a huge slacker. Whose going to bust your balls more: a boss who likes you or a boss that doesn’t? I’m not suggesting that you do so, but you can skate along pretty far on personality alone.
February 28th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
Yeah, I do consulting and lately I am onsite 40 hours a week at a company that doesn’t fancy paying triple digits and hour for me to leisurely browse. Reading your articles has basically been a checklist of everything I do to get through days without any real work to do… or days when I don’t feel like it.
February 28th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
Brad, you are one groovy dude.
I am going to work where you work so we can be friends!
Wouldn’t that be totally awesome, buddy?
February 28th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
#6: When the job starts to go sour, you won’t be tempted to stay on out of loyalty to your friends.
February 28th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
for those who agree…its to bad you hate your jobs…maybe you should find a career you enjoy…..my friends a work slack with me and we also work together to get stuff done…but hey..i love what i do…so i guess im lucky
February 28th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
sure, don’t make friends at work.
don’t get to know the people who are part of your TEAM.
hang out in the corner by yourself all alone.
BE that wierd guy that makes everyone uncomfortable.
I’m not sure what its like being your friend but my friends don’t expect anything from me. Thats the beauty of having friends.
Mutual respect goes a long way. Selfishness doesn’t.
See, I have made friends at work and you know what? We don’t go talking about work all day. Yeah it comes up sometimes but hey, you spend a good deal of your life there.
I’ve even had a relationship with a girl from work. We went out for 2 years before going calling it quits. I still worked with her. In fact, I’m still really good friends with her and I’ll be attending her wedding.
Again, it’s the mutual respect and not being selfish with your ways in life.
I hope you learn this one day and maybe then your life will be less sour and you’ll end up doing something else than writing about how to be a loser on your blog.
February 28th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
i think there should be an exception when the friend at work is a fellow avid slacker and can help pull off the cover. it’s a friendship where both parties benefit from each other. i.e. if i come in extremely late - and don’t want to walk directly to my cube with my coat on or in hand (which is an immediate giveaway that i came in from outside and am late). instead of holding my breath hoping no one will see me and walking with my head held low and cheeks red from shame and nervousness, i come to your cube first - drop my coat off, pick up a blank pad of paper and then you can walk me to my cube as if we were coming back from a meeting - without coat and without shame or nervousness. works brilliantly - especially if we are talking about the highlights of the meeting as we’re walking over. and then perhaps to pay you back, if you leave early - say around 2 or 3 and can’t sign off of aim b/c then everyone will know you’re gone. Every so often, I can go over to your cube and wiggle your mouse so you’re screen name becomes active - and at the end of the day - I can shut down your computer. if you really trusted me - i can sign on and see if you had any messages - and then you can apologize to them the next day saying you were extremely busy and didn’t have a chance to get back to them. oh i miss the corporate world.
February 28th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
In general I agree w/ this list. I don’t mind helping out people if they need my help. Hell, that’s part of my job. I’m the only one in my department that works 3rd shift, so it’s very quiet. Which leaves me with lots of lonely computer time to surf and leave comments like this. The job includes lots of slacking time. It’s not my doing or slacking.
I really agree with #3. I use to be friends or good acquaintances with people at a previous job. We would go out every Friday and get drunk together, as friends. Then after time it turned sour. People started having sex, emotions became involved, and the whole thing went in the toilet. How many friends do I still have from there? One, and that’s not because we worked together. It’s because we went to school together.
What did I learn? Rather than going through all the emotional bullshit I decided being disconnected isn’t all that bad. I do my work and I do it well. What more do I need to do?
I’d also like to reply to comment #6 by “Greg”.
I work because I have to. Re-examining won’t change the fact that I have to work. What I want to do in life is much different than what I have to do.
March 1st, 2007 at 4:11 am
I’ve made some of my best friends at work. Instead of guilting me into doing more work, we all slacked off together. The key is to befriend your peers, not your managers. That way, they quickly become your “real friends”.
March 1st, 2007 at 10:55 am
Joe:
I generally love my job, but as a consultant, I don’t have a whole lot of options when it comes to what my client wants. It’s called making the best of a shitty situation. If everyone could land a job they love, it’d be great. Great and ridiculously impossible. I’m sure you can understand the ideao f doing work you don’t want to to make a paycheck.
Plus, doing something you love as a job can have the effect of completely sucking your passion for it away because it gets marginalized and all the nuance of dealing with it as required work can take away the sheer joy of doing it.
For instance, I love coding, but when a company hires me to basically do tech support for them, I can either charge them triple digits per hour, or I could “do what I love” and skip over them to try to search out a less steady client. Only one of those really makes sense. Which is sad, but oh well. A decent life for me and my family is tops. TOPS, I SAY!
March 5th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
–
#6: When the job starts to go sour, you won’t be tempted to stay on out of loyalty to your friends.
–
This is very true, but you must remember that only you look out for #1.
#5 is also a major problem. I don’t even care if you work with your best friend, it is IMPOSSIBLE to get people to shut up about work outside of work. The American workforce needs to stop believing this is acceptable.
March 6th, 2007 at 11:21 am
[…] who surfs the internet from his office bathroom, warns us Don’t Make Friends at Work posted at Brad’s Bits (no pun […]
March 16th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Jesse: You are not reading the article.
Why not open up to your coworkers? He just gave you a bunch of reasons. There is no inherint smugness in this. Just practical reasons.
March 22nd, 2007 at 3:59 pm
I think people are pretty black or white on this issue. It’s always been my policy that they’ve got me from 8-5, but not a minute longer.
At times, there is some difficulty in this. No one wants to be sitting at their desk and hearing a bunch of people gathered together at the water cooler, talking, telling jokes and laughing (even though I’ve found the joke thing die out when a female enters as well), and you’re not there. It can make me feel left out and that this is a cliquey place in which I will never fit.
Then I remember, I WANT it this way. I share very few similar interests with my coworkers. When in social situations, what’s the main topic? Work! And finally and probably most importantly, a lot of them are in that time of their lives where they want (and have)those things called BABIES, and since the only two adjectives I have when describing children are ‘bony’ and ’shrill’ I probably won’t be having them anytime soon(or ever). It’s at this point that I remember that I’d rather have time, like right now, slacking off while I’m working, than office popularity.
I would really not do well being in one of those ‘decisions made on the golf course’ kinds of positions. I probably could have held my own during the ‘three martini lunch’ era, but that’s gone largely the way of the dinosaur.
If you break it down to the core-office friends/popularity vs. YOUR time, I’ll take MY time, every time.
Sincerely,
“the wierd [girl] who makes everyone uncomfortable.”
March 25th, 2007 at 3:23 am
Wow, that’s a lot of comments!
i think we’ve had the same issue here, why do my colleague at work are so freakin old!!, but i approach a different way, i try to hung with them only if i sit in my chair to long to stretch my back, but when they come to me.. i just tune my winamp to Crystal method song or The Scientist or any hardcore song, they magically disappear
April 12th, 2007 at 4:10 am
hi nice site.
April 12th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
I LOVE THIS BLOG!
I used to make friends at work, but that was when I was single and had too much free time.
Now I’m married with a 3 yr old, and have NO free time. So what little free time I have, I spend by myself.
My big pet peeve is lunches with coworkers. Lunch time is MY time. Even free food is not enough to get me to these social gatherings.
I have to compromise, of course. I can’t refuse a team lunch when the boss is buying. I attend about every third department monthly lunch in the break room. I attend the Christmas luncheon every other year.
But I LIVE for my lunch with my book or magazine. It’s the only alone time I get! Give me an hour with a good book and I’m energized for the rest of the day. Give me an hour lunch with coworkers, and I’m a psychotic mess for the entire afternoon.