Good morning, everyone, and welcome back to the Breakroom! When I say we have had a busy week over here, we have. As part of our originally scheduled plans, we have a wedding this weekend to go to for my brother-in-law. Obviously, this is very exciting, but it means we have a lot of involvement including hosting a few people at the house, meaning I’ve got to tidy up and play host. And then of course my husband will be with the bride on the morning of the wedding to get her hair gorgeous. Speaking of the husband, he is going through so big changes in that he is at a brand new location. He accepted a new position involving management and education with a new salon and while he was going to stay for several weeks at his old salon, they instead asked him to leave. Evidently this is not uncommon for the industry and while it was not ideal, he has been moving non-stop this week to get onboarded and start welcoming his clients as soon as possible. I am incredibly impressed with how he hasn’t let anything slow him down and instead is seeing it as an opportunity to get his career on track. On top of it all I am mildly sick so the timing of that is impeccable. But I am about to have a four day weekend so thank goodness I can attempt to find to rest. Eventually, that is.
With so much going on I need to get into this Breakdown so I can get back to my errands! You might recall that last week we saw Dunder Mifflin admit that as long as the Michael Scott Paper Company was in business, they were too much of a threat to their Scranton branch. In a stunning decision, they agreed to absorb them in a buyout which reinstates Michael as the regional manager with Pam and Ryan joining sales. And most importantly, the need for Charles to no longer oversee this branch. But now we have the question, will Dunder Mifflin be as excited to welcome them back as they assume they will be?
Before the day started, we ended up having one of the most heart-wrenching incidents. Kevin arrived with a huge vat of his homemade chili. He uses a family recipe that he spends days on, and he considers this the thing that he does best in the world. But as soon as he got into the office, he tripped and spilled the entire vat on the ground. I don’t know how many people have dropped such meals that you spent so long putting together, but I can confirm that it is a true travesty. Not to mention I’m sure everyone was looking forward to chili, and truth is I could go for a big bowl right now. Incidentally, if you are a big fan of chili too you should check out this collection of chili recipes from Brian Baumgartner, Kevin himself!
Once everyone was formally at the office, Michael arrived back with his signature flair by climbing through a hula hoop covered with paper, held aloft by Ryan and Pam. He immediately insisted on a conference room meeting where it began to be clear that he was expecting something from all of us. While most of the office was pretty clueless, I could tell that Michael was expecting us to apologize to him. In his mind, we essentially betrayed him by not choosing to follow him when he left to form his own company. While I do not necessarily agree that we owe him an apology for not taking that gamble with our careers, I can still see where he is coming from. Any chance of apologizing quickly disappears once Michael explains that any clients he was able to take from Dunder Mifflin will remain with Pam and Ryan as they are both stepping into sales positions. Dwight and the rest of the sales team are adamant that those clients should return to them now that they are with Dunder Mifflin again. Personally, I can see both sides to the situation but if I had to provide some sort of compromise then perhaps it should be up to the clienets to decide if they have a preference over who is managing their account. But this is simplu an indicator of a larger divide and that is the formerly Michael Scott Paper Company against the rest of the office and people are not pleased.
Dwight decides to take it upon himself to rally the sales department and decide how to best handle this issue. In true Dwight fashion, he decides to call a secret meeting and encodes the message on a memo using invisible ink. In this case the invisible ink is urine which appears when held over heat. For those wondering, yes urine can be used as invisible ink and has reportedly been used throughout history to encode messages. The science being that when held above heat, the acid in the urine heats up and oxidizes so it becomes visible. Being this is the 21st century in a modern office, there are plenty of other substances that Dwight could have used. Similar materials include lemon juice, vinegar, onion juice, and even milk. These all have acids in various forms and have the same effect of oxidizing when exposed to heat. Basically if you want to do some covert nonsense and send secret messages, there are much better options than using your own urine.
Ultimately, no one was able to figure out that Dwight had used invisible ink so they didn’t know to check for that sort of thing. Going forward it might be safe to assume anything from Dwight has a code embedded in it, but this time around he had call Andy to bring everyone down. So they met in the warehouse to discuss how to interact with Michael and address all of their concerns. Much like everything else Dwight attempted, nothing really was resolved. Jim tried to convince them all to just talk to him directly while Dwight wanted something more along the lines of a coup or taking Ryan hostage. Not those exactly, but something impressive and hands on like those. Leaving them to plot, Jim made his way back upstairs to confront Michael, Pam, and Ryan to warn them about what was going on down in the warehouse. While he was hoping they would see some sense, instead it only enflamed tensions and escalated the situation more.
So now we have the sales staff versus the Michael Scott Paper Company, and everyone is prepared to take no prisoners. Michael asks where they all disappeared to and they explained they were simply out to lunch. Hearing this, Michael uses it as an excuse to take and eat their lunch since they no longer were going to need what they brought in. He finally formally laid out that he was expecting an apology from all of them for not coming with him. This was when the sales team decided they could no longer silently brood. They threatened to walk out and form their own paper company the Schrute-Bernard-Lapin Vance-Stanley Paper Company. But it is Phyllis who gets honest in how hurt they were by Michael when he left. They understand he was trying to get revenge against corporate but it was all of them who really suffered and that’s when it sets in for Michael. He arranges to meet them privately down in the warehouse to try to make it right; he goes in thinking an apology and some free peppermint bark will do the trick. They only care about getting their clients back and are fully okay with having the apology taken back to do so. Defeated, Michael agrees and this means someone will not be able to be a sales person and he settles on Pam, meaning Ryan will have to back to being a temp.
The other big event that was going on at the office, particularly for those of us not involved with sales, was the reintroduction of Casual Friday. I previously did a in depth look at the history of Casual Friday back on The Office: Season 2, Episode 7 “The Client” so please head over for a read. The cliff notes version is that it can best be traced back to businesses in Hawaii implementing Aloha Fridays in which people could wear aloha shirts to work on Fridays starting in the 1940s. This eventually made its way to the continental United States before transitioning casual wear rather than specifically aloha shirts. Obviously companies are not required to offer this and it is usually reserved for companies which perhaps do not have a lot direct customer interaction. I work for a healthcare organization, for instance, and we do not have Casual Friday’s since those working on site need to always adhere to their uniform policies.
Casual Friday had disappeared for a period, I am not entirely sure what happened to it but it has been formally reinstated. Not everyone is thrilled, however, which is quickly made clear by Angela. She is upset that no one is dressed professionally, and takes particular offense to the fact that Oscar is wearing sandals and she must look at this feet. I don’t really know how she can see his feet since he is at his desk most of the day but evidently she can. Personally I had more problems with Meredith’s outfit which was much too revealing. And since she chose to not wear underwear we could see her boob, butt, and genitals. I think this is a pretty good example of what it is important to set guidelines when offering Casual Friday. Yes you are able to dress casually but you do still need to meet a certain degree of professionalism in your dress. Toby ultimately gets tired of policing everyone and decides to cancel Casual Fridays because he feels he was the only one who dressed appropriately. I think I am starting to sense why Casual Fridays were cancelled originally and I bet we will not see them come back.
This goes to show that sometimes returning to a place of work is not always as easy as you expect. And it really does go to show that if you can leave on a professional note, please do because it is wise to maintain those connections whenever you can.
I hope you all enjoyed this week’s Breakdown, and that you get out and enjoy what sounds like will be a pretty nice weekend. And if you are in the mood why don’t you share your go-to Casual Friday outfits, or chili recipes.
And as always, we’ll see you around the Breakroom.
