Good morning everyone and welcome back to the breakroom! After having such a stressful ordeal taking care of my injured dog, this week certainly seems to have flown by. I suppose sometimes having personal stress helps put your work stress into perspective and it all seems much easier to manage than we like to think. And with just one day left to hit the weekend, let us jump into what is happening at the office!
Jim, our lovable prankster, decided to kick off the day with an actual joke rather than a prank. Most of us thought it was hilarious but unfortunately Michael just couldn’t grasp the concept enough to implement the joke himself. We know plenty of people like this who have problems with jokes and can’t get the punchline quite right. My personal problem is I often find my joke so funny I laugh through most of it; tends to skew how funny the joke is. For reference, Jim’s joke goes as:
Jim: Is it just me or does it smell like up-dog in here?
Michael: What’s up-dog?
Jim: Not much, what’s up with you?
The joke is that the listener doesn’t understand what up-dog is, and when asking what it is it comes off as “what is up, dog?” Very funny, and also a pretty old school joke; use it in good health!
Overall, it was a pretty busy day intended to ensure we are productive: spring cleaning. I know you are wondering why we would be doing our spring cleaning in January; per Michael, if you do it in January then we do not have to do anything come spring time. I do not believe as many offices do a designated spring cleaning day but I feel that they should consider doing it. It is easy to say that we will routinely keep our desks clean but it is all too easy for this practice to spiral out. We might hold onto many documents or items “just in case” and start to forget that we have set them aside. They say that a cluttered desk leads to a cluttered mind; if that’s true than an empty desk leads to an empty mind.
Well the office has this project designed to be as effective as possible, lead by Dwight at the helm of the project. Taking it very serious, he has an assortment of recycling and trash bins set up to ensure we have enough bins to throw out whatever isn’t needed. Additionally, he has list of the duties we must do aside from our own desks/cubicles. Just to name a few, he has included: bathrooms, kitchen, dusting, and organizing our menu binder. As for our desks/cubicles, this include clearing out any trash or unnecessary items from our desks as well as cleaning the surfaces.
Spring cleaning your office sounds pretty straightforward but it is beneficial to have a general plan of what is needed to ensure the key pieces are done. You might even want to use this as a chance to reorganize your set up; I personally always evaluate if there is a better set up when I attempt to deep clean a space. I recently reorganized my own home office as a means to open up the space a bit more so my chair doesn’t bump into anything (a brand new office chair, courtesy of my husband from OfficeMax) as well as to ensure my four legged coworkers can lounge about comfortably.
Office Depot/OfficeMax has even published an article focused on offering spring cleaning tips for your home office and their first recommendation is to bring order to your office. Home offices are typically smaller than space you might have in a standard office setting, so it’s crucial the space is efficient and allows you to do your job effectively. This includes taking stock of all that is in the office and evaluate if it’s best there, or perhaps should be situated in a different room. It’s also smart to take stock of all your office supplies to ensure you are not running low on anything and might need to swing by your local Office Deport or OfficeMax to replenish. If you are redesigning the space, you might want to evaluate if additional storage units could be helpful to maximize the space. I am a big fan of floating wall shelves, especially for incorporating items that help had some softness to my work setting. This includes plants, some stuffed animals that make me happy, various personal mementos, a incense holder, and a HappyLight sun lamp. Besides sifting through papers that can be shredded and disposing of etcetera trash, do not forget to clean the space itself. Dusting, wiping down surfaces, and vacuuming is all crucial to maintain an area free of dust and dirt1.
Do you work from an office/cubicle and perhaps want some tips focused on a formal office setting? Well, The Muse has also formulated a set of recommendations that can assist with bring some order to the office. First recommendation is quite simply, get rid of the junk! This can include rubber bands (which no one uses), spare pencils that never get used, or loose receipts for your lunches. The also recommend the importance of organizing your drawers. Your desk should not act like a junk drawer in which everything is simply thrown in; each space should have a purpose to ensure you can find anything you might actually need. And they mention that sometimes you might just need to spruce it up a bit to offer a change. Perhaps a plant, a fun poster or calendar, or some colorful new office supplies (I’m obsessed with pastel colors lately)2.
We each have our own specific tasks in the office (I was tasked with focusing on the annex) everyone is hard at work. That is, until Dwight noticed that Oscar had actually called in sick; on a Friday, as well as cleaning day. This quickly drew his attention away from the cleaning and held up with Michael in his office to try to ascertain what the plan is. Obviously, Dwight is assuming that Oscar didn’t want to clean and chose to call in sick so he could have an extra long weekend. If that’s true, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time it happened. In fact, Michael mentioned that he read somewhere that in regards to sick call ins, two out of five business days are Mondays and Fridays. In all truth, nearly every employee is bound to call in sick at least a handful of times in their careers. I considered pulling statistics over the last couple of years but upon review it dawned on me that these statistics since 2020 are going to be significantly different than previous years. With Covid-19 there were so many policies relating to exposure, there was more sick time taken than before and can expect that for the future.
Calling in sick to simply get out of work, I did find the need to look this up. According to a survey conducted by Zippia, they found that 52% of participants admitted to calling in sick to get out of work. Among the other details they pulled, they did find that it was Monday which is the day most commonly called in on. Additionally, one in three people who called in would do it the day after a holiday; that is a bit too bold for my taste. Looking at the reasons behind while people called in, the most common instance was actually being sick with the second reason being a mental health day3. Anyone honest enough to comment down below with a reason for which they chose to call in sick to work? I personally have not done it since I was in my teens, and it was usually just to have a day goofing off. Between working remotely and having pretty good flexibility to taking days off that I want or need, I haven’t felt the need to call in sick in quite a few years. I also considered including some information on how to successfully call in sick to work when you just do not want to go in. I am going to leave it as, choose to do this at your own discretion. The key piece I want to relay; if you do get caught and are in trouble, be prepared to take responsibility for your own actions.
In this case, Michael agrees with Dwight that it is oddly suspicious that Oscar called in sick; he even called him to try to see if he could ascertain if he was lying over the phone. With no definitive proof, he decide to have Dwight drop everything else and make this his priority. Since an office cannot function if people are not at their desks doing their jobs (but Dwight must be the exception). With this new authority, Dwight takes time interviewing us all around the office to see if we have any inside knowledge such as he looked sick yesterday or how did he sniffle over the phone (since there are three types of sniffling). At a lack of answers, I saw Dwight leave for the day and didn’t actually return so I’m not sure what happened there.
With Dwight concerned over this, I noticed Michael and Jim spending quite a bit of time together. They even went out to lunch out of the blue; Jim didn’t seem too keen on the whole thing so funny he decided to do that. That is, until Michael came back and attempted to submit the lunch as a business expense; lunch at Hooters is not exactly a business expenditure. And that is when he let slip that Jim has been depressed because he was in love with a girl he works with who is engaged. Well, he let this slip at the office so we naturally know that he is referring to Pam since she is the only person engaged. This was the gossip for the rest of the day between trying to talk to Jim about how attractive Pam was, to debating on if Pam should choose Jim or Roy (I’m personally team Jim). Not quite sure what Jim was thinking in confiding this to Michael because he should’ve know that he’d never keep that a secret. Not quite sure what all came from this situation but I did see Jim and Pam talking so they seemed to have been able to clear this entire instance up. In more productive news, I was able to finish my cleaning early enough that spent some time clearing out my email inbox.
And that was how the day went today at the office. We learned that calling in sick, while not being sick, is a lot more common than some people might imagine (this doesn’t mean you should do it). We also focused a great deal on the importance to spring cleaning your office area and some tips to freshen it up. If nothing else, I think we learned that you shouldn’t tell Michael Scott any secrets. And with that, it is officially the weekend. I look forward to seeing you all next week; like always, I will see you around the breakroom.
I talked about how a benefit to spring cleaning is using it as an opportunity to spruce up your space; please comment below on some of your favorite “spruces” you have added to your own space.
- Unger, J. (2023, February 16). Spring Cleaning Tips for Your Home Office. Office Depot/OfficeMax. Retrieved January 11, 2024, from https://www.officedepot.com/l/ideas-center/find-solutions/spring-cleaning-tips-for-your-home-office ↩︎
- Douthwaite Wolf, K. (2020, June 19). Spring Clean Your Cubicle! The Muse. Retrieved January 11, 2024, from https://www.themuse.com/advice/spring-clean-your-cubicle ↩︎
- Morris, K. (2020, June 22). Cough, Cough: More than half of all workers call in “sick”. Zippia. Retrieved January 11, 2024, from https://www.zippia.com/advice/sick-day-survey-facts/ ↩︎
