Social Animals

You will spend over two thirds of your waking life at or on your way to work (assuming you work a 40 hour week, commute from New Zealand every day, and sleep approximately 14 hours a night). It is therefore vital that any socialising at work is done with people you don’t hate.

The Plankton social scene shares a number of similarities to that of any high school. There are the cool kids, the nerds, the jocks and that one kid who smells like wee. Finding someone to have a coffee with is simply a matter of determining into which group you fit. This is easy if you have a realistic idea of your personality but difficult if, like most people, you hold the delusion that you cannot be pigeon-holed but are in fact an individual who is easy going enough to fit into any group.

In the break room there is a chart showing the hierarchy and current membership of each social clique. There are two basic approaches to finding your place. You may choose to start at the top of this chart and work your way down. This can be discouraging because, as you try to fit in to each group, you will be met with a number of rejections. However, this will be offset by a warm feeling of acceptance once you have sunk to the right level.

Alternatively you may start at the bottom and work your way up. Your confidence will soar as you sweep up the hierarchy, leaving the socially inept in your wake, until you finally encounter a group that are, frankly, too good for you. You can then saunter back into the previous group with the confidence that you have found your true home.

If you can’t get any group to accept you it would be advisable to get your bladder checked.

Junket Junkies

We are all important. Staff who work in support, development, administration or yes, even management, all contribute to Plankton’s success. However, there are obviously a few of us who are slightly more important than the others. Those few are the ones chosen to go on company outings, or junkets.

Put simply, a junket is any trip that takes you away from the Plankton offices and provides some kind of free stuff. Not all junkets are the same, though, and learning to recognise the different types can save you some embarrassment when bragging to your colleagues.

Working junket: Sure, you get to stay in a hotel. You get free meals. You might even get a free pen. But they actually expect you to work. And not just namby pamby “give a presentation” kind of work, but the kind of work where if you didn’t look up and see a slightly different shade of grey carpet on the cubicle wall you might think you were still at your own desk.

Junket du jour, or junkette. This is any trip, for example training or a seminar, that lasts for a day or less. You don’t get an overnight stay, but you do get free stuff. An un-catered meeting at a client site does not count as a junkette. If you get a donut then it’s an incredibly pathetic junkette, but a junkette nevertheless.

Maxi Junket: This is the real deal. You get an overnight stay, you get free meals and free merchandise (preferably electronic in nature). You may even fly to get there. And hopefully all you need to do is wear a name tag for three days while industry hawkers try to convince you of the quality of their product in the hope that you are more important than you look.

Communication Breakdown

As the human species evolves, so does its methods of communication. When life began in the primordial soup, we were solitary and silent. As marine life we used colours to indicate location. Once we became simplistic land animals we used smells as a form of marking territory and as we developed physically we began to use facial expressions and crude drawings. Basic grunting soon followed until we eventually developed spoken language.

After that came the written word, and then Gutenberg’s famous invention: the printing press. (Note that although he had great success with his first printing press, each one after that deteriorated in quality until Printing Press 7: Mission To Moscow, which Gutenberg wasn’t even involved with.) Technology had changed forever how we communicate and would so again with the typewriter and finally the internet.

And it is no surprise that each stage of this particular evolutionary journey is represented in the modern office.

Some people drift alone from meeting to meeting never aware of those around them. Cyclists in the office use their revealing and brightly coloured bodysuits to let us know “I AM GOING FOR A RIDE NOW!” and they, along with all other exercising employees use a form of smell to let us know when they have returned.

The facial expressions of certain developers when you ask “why can’t we stick this widget on this doovie here” instantly conveys precisely where they would like to stick your widget, and one visit to the toilets will let you know that many people here are quite adept at basic grunting and crude drawings.

Finally, spoken and written words have developed with the technology on which we use them, with new words being coined daily. In fact, due to time management directives, all Plankton staff have now been instructed to invent new words rather than waste time referentialising existing ones.

Location Location Location

If you have worked at Plankton for longer than three months, chances are you will have moved desks at least twice. Management take great care to ensure that people who are working on similar projects, as well as people with complimentary skill sets, are seated together. However, sometimes they just like to mess with our heads.

Look around the office and you will see that there are exactly three people who have never moved desks. Look deeper, however, and you will soon find that neither those people, nor the desks at which they sit, actually exist. Like a desert oasis or a short efficient meeting, they are a utopian illusion created by our subconscious in hope of what might one day exist. Collectively we think “I wish I could be like Lee. (At least, I think that’s his – or her - name. Short-ish tall person - got a sort of light coloured black hair.) Lee has never had to move, so maybe one day, neither will I.”

With everyone constantly on the move, it can be difficult to find a particular person when you need to. Each desk is assigned a Cartesian co-ordinate, however these are only to be used when playing office games (“QA at F9 takes manager’s pawn at C4 - You sunk my project team!”). Older staff will remember the complex network of mirrors that were installed in the ceiling, which made finding someone as easy as looking up. However, for privacy reasons these have been replaced with a new system. Look on your arm, or perhaps on some other part of your body, and you will notice a small scar. While you were sleeping Plankton operatives installed a tracking chip in you, and the wiki page showing the exact location of each staff member is now online.

Email is not a dirty word

Email is an essential tool in the modern office. Sending an email can save time, save paper and most importantly save you from any physical interaction with your colleagues. Also, by allowing you time to review and edit your message, emails ensure that clear and concise communication is achieved, and any misunderstandings are avoided (although this has never been proven in practice).

The wonderful thing about email is that whether you are organising a meeting or forwarding a funny joke about cats, it always looks like work. One fictional study has shown that 87% of an office worker’s time is taken up by sending and receiving emails, and 94% of those emails are not work related (the other 6% are from managers asking you to do something you were already doing).

One email pitfall, however, is the Reply-To-All button. Most sensible companies have this button disabled but here at Plankton we relish the moments where someone accidentally tells everyone what their special dietary requirements are, what they really think of their Line Manager or which co-worker they’ve been discreetly seeing after work.

If you find the temptation too strong, there is a plugin that can be installed on the Reply-To-All button which will, every time you press it, ask you a series of mathematical, logical, grammatical, emotional and moral questions. After you submit this short survey, the system will determine if you are intelligent and responsible enough to be allowed to send your message.

Regardless of how you send your email please be aware that every single email is printed on ePaper. To help preserve the eTrees and prevent eClimate-Change consider whether you really need to send that next email, or whether it would perhaps be better to print your message (with a cover and footer sheet) and slip it into the coal-powered vacuum tube system we have installed in the wall cavities.

Food for thought

If you work somewhere for long enough you will learn to interpret the little signs that the environment is giving you. A streaky line on a printout means the toner needs replacing. If the coffee machine is beeping and its lights are flashing, then someone has got a full house and won the jackpot. And if the air conditioning is working it means that we have moved offices.

One sign that we all should learn to recognise is the presence of a large group of clients. When clients are in the office, staff are expected to dress neatly and behave with more courtesy than is usual (i.e. some). More importantly though, there is a strong chance that there is a catered meeting, and that means free leftovers.

Leftovers from a catered meeting often come out just after most people return from their lunch break, however it is common knowledge that the stomachus dessertus we develop as a child (the extra gastric organ which allows children to be full of broccoli and meatloaf but still have room for ice-cream) matures at adulthood into stomachus leftoverus. This makes it possible for someone to be brimming from a recently consumed lunch and still find room for free chicken sticks and deep fried cheese balls.

If you are privileged enough to actually attend a catered meeting, keep in mind your co-workers who are not. You may be tempted to employ all available stomachs, and eat as much as you possibly can, ensuring the freeloaders get nothing. But remember that you were once like them, eagerly flocking with the other seagulls outside the meeting-room door. You should make sure that something is left behind for them, even if it is just those cucumber and celery sticks wrapped in rice paper that nobody else wants.

The Eternal Struggle

Some people crave exposure to nature and the outdoors and will endeavour to brighten their world with sunshine whenever possible. Let’s call these people hippies. Others avoid the sun at all costs, shying away from its ultraviolet glare and seeking out darkness in every corner that it lurks. Let’s call these people vampires.

Those who are untrained in the delicate balance of the office ecosystem would assume that the best place for hippies is in the sunlight of a window seat, and the best place for vampires is in the darkness towards the centre of the building. This is certainly what each group would prefer, however if this arrangement were to occur the vampires would just sleep all day hanging upside-down in the exposed network cables running through the ceiling ducts, and the hippies would continually sing folk songs and stick flowers in their USB ports. Very little software development would happen.

Not surprisingly the opposite arrangement, with hippies in the darkness and vampires in the light, is equally disastrous. Without their friend the sun to guide them through the day, the hippies would wander blindly and disturb the mushroom plantations growing in the empty computer boxes. And of course, with regular exposure to sunlight the vampires would simply combust.

So management, in its increasingly evident wisdom, has decided to mingle these groups. Some vampires are forced to sit near the window, and are locked in constant conflict with the nature loving hippies over the state of the blinds. Some hippies, on the other hand, are forced to inhabit the gloom, providing the resident vampires with a free, if somewhat frightened and bewildered, snack.

Thus the ecosystem is maintained and productivity is at its peak. And as long as people are willing to clean up the small piles of ash and the shreds of bloodied tie-dyed clothing that inevitably appear, there will always be spare desks and room for new employees.