Good morning and welcome back to the breakroom! I hope you have had an amazing week and those of you in dealing with below zero temperatures like I have this week, staying warm the best you can. I am sure you are all ready to get to your weekend so why don’t I breakdown what has happened here at the office!
For starters, Jim has been off for awhile because Pam was out on vacation for a couple of weeks. She and Roy went to the Poconos for some skiing. I think this was to do with celebrating that they finally set a date for the wedding this spring. Pam always tries to hold off taking her vacation as long as possible and this year she made it to the third week of January, so she has already used her 10 days.
This brings up some pretty good questions on how is vacation time viewed in the United States and I was able to find some interesting statistics compiled by Forbes. First of all, there is not truly any federal law requiring businesses to compensate employees for their unpaid time. This means that there are many employees who do not have access to vacation or holiday time, with an estimated 28 million Americans falling into this group. While not required, many companies do have holiday and vacation or Paid Time Off (PTO) plans as incentives for bringing in the best talent. Nationally it seems the average employee receives 11 days of vacation a year, with this number normally being higher as your seniority grows. Additionally, the average number of sick days for employees is right around 8 days and holidays are set set 7.6 days. This is just on vacation and sick time, but there are many companies which utilize Paid Time Off which comprises all of this time into one balance that can then be used for both scheduled or unscheduled purposes. Additionally, there are more and more companies experimenting with unlimited PTO which truly means employees have unlimited time off. Having never worked in a company that offers this I am sure there are certain caveats, but supposedly these employees do cite a strong work and life balance. Finally, let us conclude that not only does the United States have the among the fewest average vacation days for workers, it is the only country of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) which does not federally mandate paid time off. For those wondering, France is at the top of the list with their 31 days of paid time off1. Long story short, while paid time off might not be legally required federally (there are some states with their own laws mandating it) your staff work hard and deserve to have some form of paid time off allotted to them.
But Pam is officially back from her vacation today! Which I’m sure Ryan is also happy about, I heard him muttering about how people kept staring at him while he was up at reception so I’m not quite sure what was going on there. And that was when we all thought the day was going to be like any other. Pam was back at reception, Michael had arrived with a fun nickname of Spamster (Pam + Spam + Hamster); and then Michael went into his office. He gave out an exaggerated yell and as we came to his aid, we smelled it. Like something from a broken sewer line in the middle of the summer, a horrendous odor emerged from his office overtaking all of our senses. Michael believes he sees something but, naturally, doesn’t want to go in so he urges Kevin in before closing the door on him. A few of us finally dare go in with him and that is when we see, it. I’d prefer not to describe what it was but I will just say that Michael tried to rationalize that this must have emerged from a sewer pipe some place. I’m ready to go the to the mat that a person intentionally went in there and left that thing there as some sort of disgusting joke or retribution.
Rather than spending so much time staring at it like some people, I did have he common sense to contact the building’s housekeeping so she should come and clean it. Unfortunately, it was much too late because the smell was fully saturated into the carpet and the office so this didn’t fix the issue as much as we wanted. Michael then had Roy and Darryl brought up to replace the carpet. I would like to know why our warehouse staff was so willing to do it when technically this should have been done by the building’s staff; though I am going to go with that Michael was simply annoyed with them following the housekeeper’s job with the carpet. Having previously spent time in housekeeping, I do know a thing or two about carpet cleaning. One of the best tricks I picked up was increased use of carpet tiles, rather than full carpet. By having the carpet broken up into tiles, it is very easy to simply replace the affected tile rather than need to rip up an entire room’s worth of carpeting. If you are looking to recarpet your office area, I would highly recommend looking into this option because it could absolutely save a lot of time and money should you come through a situation like this.
With his office being having the carpet ripped up and replaced, Michael decided to work in the bullpen at Jim’s desk. He offered to share but Jim decided he’d rather just take up the spare desk in the annex next to Kelly. Not sure how he enjoyed it, however. I popped back there a couple of times and I could see Kelly talking non-stop with him and he just maintained this glassy eyed look as she spoke. Aside from that, I don’t really recall seeing him again until the end of the day when he came out to check the messages on his phone. He wasn’t hanging at reception like he normally does and I didn’t even see him in the breakroom for lunch, so maybe he was enjoying his time in the annex.
At the same time, it became quite apparent that his personal office actually helps keep Michael in check because he honestly became a bit of a nuisance. He kept talking about the “good old days” when he was in sales with Packer (our traveling salesman) because they played all sorts of jokes around the office. He even gets Dwight to partake in a “old-fashioned panty raid” at accounting. By this, he simply means they come in out of no where and throw all of their folders and papers onto the ground to create more work for them. I, for one, and very glad that I was not around when Michael used to roam this place with Packer playing all of these “jokes” on people which really are not funny and just annoy the rest of us. He tries to rationalize he actions because “we are working for the weekend, he is working for the week.” I will say that he does enjoy being at work more than anyone else, but I think that has more to do with the fact that he doesn’t have much else going on outside of work. To try to motivate the sales team, he decides to hold a sales contest for a crisp $100 bill from his wallet. He ultimately only has has $83 but still a good prize that he will compete against the rest of the sales team for. This really starts to inspire the group and they are really trying to get those sales for the money, but Michael starts to spiral out a bit. He caught some of us laughing over the carpet incident and I think he overheard that we were trying to figure out who did it. Michael decides to call off the entire contest because he decides that today is a day that they should be mourning following this terrible hate crime (which for Michael, it simply means he hates it). And with that, the office morale is just wiped out and we are once again wishing he was back in his own office.
We were just waiting for the end of the day after this because the atmosphere became quite unbearable, especially after Michael’s “office time out.” I think he really was starting to spiral because when I had popped out to him car I saw that he somehow got his old boss, Ed Truck, to come on by. I was able to overhear them talking about how as a manager, Michael has to be prepared that his staff will not like him because they are simply employees and not his friends or family. I knew all too well Michael wasn’t going to handle this well so I got out of there, waiting for this day to be over. Michael came back, completely disillusioned with his office and then he got that phone call. Like his ears were burning, it was Michael’s buddy Packer and he was wondering if he got the package that he left. Michael didn’t seem to catch it as fast as the rest of us, but it seems that he was the one who left the “package” in the middle of Michael’s office and started this whole day. Michael saw it as a betrayal from one of us but suddenly it was a great prank of love coming from Packer. That pretty much clinched the day for most of us and we were all too happy to get the heck out of there and just forget today.
And that was what happened at the office today. We got to have our own whodunit; rather than a mystery worth of Hercule Poirot, we get an obnoxious salesman who defecated on a carpet like an animal. On a lighter note, we did get some interesting statistics on vacation time in the United States and those sorts of facts are always fun. With that, I wish everyone one a happy Friday and a fantastic weekend. Again, everyone dealing with below zero weather I hope you stay nice and warm! Until next time, I’ll be sure to see you around the breakroom.
- Baluch, A. (2023, May 30). Average PTO In The US & Other PTO Statistics (2024). Forbes. Retrieved January 18, 2024, from https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/pto-statistics/ ↩︎
