small talk
I love to sit in silence with my thoughts, whether I’m by myself or with others. It’s true serenity — my time to reflect, decompress and gain inspiration. I’ve always hated small talk because of this. Filling the void with useless conversation about the weather (my personal favorite), work, or children. I never realized the real importance of learning how to small talk with people until I started working an office job. Sure in food and customer service you do it often enough but for the most part you assist customers and they go on their merry way. In an office job, it’s how you build connections with people around the building. (Do I care how your weekend really went? No. Am I still going to ask? Yes.)
I don’t enjoy working in an office, it feels like high school on steroids and makes you realize some people don’t outgrow that part of their life it’s just transferred to a new setting. If you’ve seen the movie ‘Mean Girls,” there is a scene where Janis and Damian walk Katie through the lunchroom and introduce all the cliques in the school until finally she meets the Plastics. Each clique in this case would be a department. I know what to expect from the IT guys who are tired of people forgetting their password (…guilty), the Development department begging for money day in and out (fundraising is what they call it actually), and the Finance department making sure we’re getting paid on time (the real MVP’s!) I have my own version of small talk with each and every one of them.
It could be because of how nosy I am, but I’m realizing small talk isn’t so bad now. I love the moment when someone opens up to you and have a real human moment with them beyond their office persona. According to our company culture we’re a “family,” which is just code for everyone is going be working overtime doing multiple jobs for less pay than we’re worth and we’re gonna have to do it with a smile because we believe in the mission. It’s what family would do for each other right? (Wrong!) So I truly enjoy the moments where we can be honest with each other and express our unhappiness with the way things are. We do employee surveys and have resource groups and have given back so much feedback to our leadership team but does it feel like anything ever changes? I can’t say it does. And if it does it doesn’t last very long.
I think this was further highlighted by the pandemic because as a collective we realized how you don’t actually have to work forty hour weeks to accomplish your tasks. (Honestly, I think we could work half that and really get to enjoy life again.) Now that I know I don’t have work as long and as hard and can still get what I need to done, why am I gonna want to go above and beyond?
The energy since being back in the office has shifted. During my small talk trips throughout the office, using any excuse I can to get away from my desk, I’ve found many people felt the same way. Like we’re all just waiting for Friday, for a break, and this is after walking past someone in the hallway at 10 am on Monday. I’ve also learned a lot of the office gossip during these trips: whose getting written up, terminated, the tea on different donors — this the water cooler talk they’re dying for us to have.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that I also find myself picking up more on microaggressions in my workplace. There was a time where I didn’t pick up on these things, probably because I was keeping to myself. As a receptionist I spent much of my time alone unless a guest arrived or someone stopped by to talk to me for a few minutes. Now that I’m in a position where I’m the gatekeeper to a very important person, they’ve got a lot more to say.
I can see so much clearly who a person is by what they say to me and what they don’t say. Once there was a woman talking about how diverse of an audience we had for a performance was: “there were elderly white people there, well dressed Black people, some Asian people.” That moment is forever be ingrained in my memory because it hits you that even though we’re all colleagues, we work closely, laughing and joking around, there’s always part of them that’ll never see beyond your skin color (like they claim they do — “we’re all human!”) No matter how well you do at your job, how well you dress, how articulate, how “good” you are. Somehow we have to do much more yet never measure up.
As much as I’ve been enjoying getting back to making connections with people, it’s still so important to be careful who you tell what to. And that’s the reason I’ll be sticking strictly to small talk. Nice weather we’re having!
