Office Life Really Sucks

We had a water cooler at my last job. As in, a machine that took tap water and cooled it so that it was nicer to drink than water from the sink. We're not talking about a water bubbler here, which is a machine that cools and dispenses spring water from a big overturned bottle. We're talking about tap water. Not even filtered. Straight from the pipes.

Which, by the way, is fine with me. That's not where I'm going here. Tap water is what I drink at home. I used to have one of those Britta filters. But it was too much of a pain in the ass to monitor the health of my filter. And anyway, the filter took up so much room in the container that I found myself refilling the fucking thing every night. And my sink is usually full of dishes, so finessing the container under the faucet was a pain in the ass. And the filters weren't cheap, and at the time, I had no money. So yeah. I gave up on filtered water. NYC has some of the cleanest, best tasting tap water in the nation, so I decided to take advantage of it.

Which was exactly the theory upon which my former employer was operating. It was an environmental organization, so feeding the billion dollar bottled water machine in the face of perfectly potable tap water would have contradicted our calls for reduced consumption, protection of exotic places, and awareness that petroleum-based plastics are more-or-less the spawn of the Devil.

So we're all good here. Office life, in this story at least, has not yet begun to suck.

Where the train goes off the tracks is this chick. Who, if I'm going to be transparent about things, I disliked on many levels. And I don't know whether the water thing that I'm about to tell you about was the chicken or the egg in this situation. But here's the deal: She insisted upon filling the industrial-sized coffeemaker with water from the water cooler. In other words, draining our entire supply of what was nothing more than cooled tap water in order to fill the coffeemaker, which really just heated the water back up again. Leaving those of us with an interest in drinking cooled tap water to stand around the kitchen waiting, waiting, waiting for the water cooler to replenish its cool water supply. Which took forever.

I was talking in another post about things that might land me in jail some day -- or at the very least get me fired -- and this was another one of them. I lived in fear that I might just completely snap on this chick some day. Walk into the kitchen to find her emptying our water cooler for the umpteenth time and just go apeshit all over the place. You know. Snatch the container of water she'd just filled and smash into to the ground. Grab the coffeemaker and wave it about in the air menacingly. Hurl obscenities in her direction generally and pointed insults in her direction specifically. More or less cause a scene is what I'm trying to get at here.

And this is what I mean when I say that office life sucks. Because here's what happened tonight: I went upstairs in my current office to get some water from the water bubbler, and I got wondering how the hot water tap makes water hot. You press it down, and boiling water pours out instantly. Considering that it's unlikely our office water bubbler comes equipped with super heating technology that boils water on contact, I imagine the bubbler fills a little internal container with water and then spends all day and night keeping it piping hot. Which, in addition to being one hell of a waste of energy, opens the possibility that a person could completely drain the bubbler of its entire supply of hot water. Leaving those of us with an interest in hot water to stand in the kitchen waiting, waiting, waiting for the water bubbler to replenish its hot water supply.

This thought -- and the anxiety it created within me -- is familiar. And all of the sudden I'm furious.

So let's review: I left my office to get a glass of water, and I came back three minutes later furious. About something that hasn't happened to me in several years, and likely won't ever happen again, and really wasn't that big a deal in the first place. But when you spend this much time with people, in such small confines, in often unhappy circumstances (because let's face it, we'd all rather be almost anywhere than at work) stupid shit can matastasize into something that's quite excrutiatingly irritating. My biggest fear in life isn't the almost likely possibility that I'll get run over by a car, it's that someone who wears too much cologne or hums unconsciously will move into the empty desk in my office. It just doesn't seem right.

Now. The flipside to this, of course, is that office life is also hilarious. I was listening to an interview with Gord Downie from The Tragically Hip the other evening, and he was talking about how being in a band is really funny. How, if you quit your band, your life will automatically be a lot less humorous. But that may not be true, Gord. You could come and work in an office. It's hilarious here. It's why Then We Came To The End is the funniest book I've ever read, and why Dilbert has been around for 20 years, and why people can quote the movie Office Space from start to finish. We're a tortured people, cube jockeys and office dwellers, and it's either hilarious or its excrutiating. It's rare that it's anything in between.