Good morning everyone and welcome back to the Breakroom, and to the new year! That’s right, this is the first official post of 2025. I do not know about you but I am already exhausted with this year; something about the holiday season always seem to cause employees and leaders to become pretty absentminded at work, and then they need to call us in to fix all of their problems. No fixing problems is certainly part of my job, but my problem is fixing preventable problems, because there is a difference. I cannot tell you how much time would open up if people simply took the time to review their timecards before they get paid. But there are too many people who seem to think it is not their job to make sure they have logged their time accurately. I think all employees should make a resolution for the year that they will do their job more efficiently to the point they do not need to have people clean up their messes. But enough venting about work, let us do an office Breakdown instead.
The big news is that someone was poached! You may remember Karen Filippelli, she used to work here in sales and was dating Jim for awhile after coming over from the Stamford branch. Well, after leaving here when Jim broke up with her she took on a job as Regional Manager for our Utica branch. But she found a way to still impact us here by offering our own Stanley Hudson by offering him a better paying position with them. And that essentially set the tone for the rest of the day.
Michael isn’t willing to lose anyone from the office and he is viewing this as an assault on this office. The rest of us thought this was a great opportunity for Stanley, but I suppose not everyone things the same way. To confront this, Michael has attempted numerous methods of retaliation. His first impulse was to call Karen directly and try to talk her out of doing this. Even when offering up Toby as a suitable replacement, she refused to give in and said it was up to Stanley if he wanted to accept the offer. His next best idea was try to poach Karen’s best salesman, and eye for an eye, so that way he could ensure she suffers as well. Needless to say, Michael did not do a great job of convincing him to leave Utica. Evidently, word gets around on Michael’s antics, including how he had accidentally ran over Meredith with his car and Scranton is seen as a bit of a joke because of it.
This leaves Michael with one final option, and that is to make a sale so large it restores our branch’s reputation. He recruits Jim to join him and Dwight to triple team a potential customer that recently dropped Staples. And just like that, they were off to land a whale of a company. Or so we thought. Turns out, Dwight and Michael tricked Jim because what they were really doing was driving up to Utica to confront Karen themselves. They didn’t truly have an idea because they brought in a huge assortment of tools including warehouse uniforms, chalk (to grind up into dust), and even Molotov cocktails made with gasoline. Luckily they brought in Jim because he was able to talk them out of setting fire to the Utica branch, but they were adamant on some sort retribution. They settled on making a mess with silly string and made it into the office (with Jim waiting in the care) but then they saw Utica’s crown jewel, their industrial copier. Michael and Dwight were trying to steal it when everything went wrong (as if it was going so right up until now) when they tried to wheel it down the stairs and it ended up pinning them up against the wall. It was at about this time that Karen saw Jim hanging out in the parking lot and confront him, and then heard the whole commotion over the walkie talkie. She corralled them all together and berated them for acting so ridiculous over the situation.
For the record, she is certainly right and they are lucky they weren’t fired over this. It doesn’t matter that Utica is another branch, trying to break in and steal a copier or deface their break room is incredibly inappropriate and could land you in a world of trouble. If you are having a dispute with another branch, or even a friendly competition, you do need to maintain a level of professionalism because this is a work setting at the end of the day. Unfortunately, I do not believe Michael really learned his lesson, especially when Stanley told him that he was choosing to stay in Scranton. Turns out, Stanley didn’t actually want to move to Utica. He was hoping he could motivate Michael to give him a competing offer and get a raise to stick around. I personally find those types of tactics to get a raise pretty underhanded, so I’m sort of okay that it blew up in Stanley’s face.
Besides all this nonsense going on, today was also a big day because it was the monthly meeting of the Finer Things Club. Considered the most exclusive club in the office, they routinely get to discuss art and literature. The members consist of Pam, Oscar, and Toby and they are incredibly tight on who they allow in. Andy has spent considerable time trying to get invited, including offering a bribe and a letter of recommendation from Senator Santorum. Choosing to remain a closed club, they did decide to let him on a wait list until they are in need of more members. Interestingly, Andy has an odd view on the various clubs of the office. He views Finer Things as the elite choice, with the Party Planning Committee being his backup and Kevin’s band being his safety.
The Finer Things Club is a great idea and should definitely be considered as an idea for those who are looking to bring in such a get together at their own office. You do not have base your group on studying art and literature like they do, but it is not uncommon for colleagues to design such groups where they can interact and bond over shared interests. How Finer Things likes to do things is choose a topic for that month and they cater the menu and even outfits based upon the theme. Some examples include:
- They read The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende; a Chilean novelist, they chose to eat empanadas and wore scarves.
- When they read Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, they had green tea and sushi to accompany the discussion.
- When the topic was Claude Monet Painting in his Studio by Edouard Manet, they had strawberry crepes and wine, all while wearing berets.
- This day’s read was A Room with a View by E. M. Forster and they had tea with finger sandwiches, all while listening to Vivaldi.
Even if you are not looking to do this with colleagues, having weekly or monthly events can very fun to ensure you routinely get together with friends. I myself have a weekly Dungeons and Dragons and group (which I have discussed before). I have thought about doing a book club before, but certainly one aspect is ensuring that everyone remembers to read the book and take the group seriously. We see how things can go wrong with the Finer Things Club when Pam invites Jim after his embarrassing encounter with Karen.
Jim was all excited for his first meeting in which they are discussing Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. They are enjoying baked potatoes, drinking beer, and are dressed in Irish garb. It became clear right away with that Jim did not read the book and tries to cover with his jokes. Evidently Oscar believes Jim tends to monopolize conversations by being funny and that was one of the reasons why he hadn’t been invited before, and will likely not be invited again. I cannot stress enough, if you do join a group like this, you are expected to take part in the activities so do not join if you cannot commit. I do like the concept of the Finer Things Club so I feel I may need to do a future post with a breakdown of possible books and themes that people can use as a starting off point, so watch for that.
And that was what happened in the office this week. I hope I have talked someone of you out of doing an “old-fashioned panty raid” at another company branch, while talking you into joining the Finer Things Club. It is finally the weekend after all of the holidays we have had in the middle of the week, I hope you can finally catch your breath, so to speak. Here is to 2025 and working towards a better year.
