Breakroom Breakdown

Good morning everyone and welcome back to the Breakroom! I hope you have all had a great week that has led to finally to this Friday. Actually work has been pretty good this week, it was busy but not in the sense that I was dreading having to go into work. Some long days, I actually chose to do a flex day this week where I worked four 10-hour days to take a day off. A friend of ours was up so we decided to do a fun autumn day in town. My famous French beef stew for dinner, then brunch at a local restaurant the next morning, followed by a hiking at Pattison State Park over in Wisconsin for a few hours, and wrapping up the time with some steak off the barbecue and garden-fresh vegetables. For most people this would all sound pretty standard but it made for a great day of not worrying about work or the various stresses in our lives and focus on the positive with people important to me. So this is my recommendation for the next week, take some time to just spend time with people who recharge and inspire you. Too often we find ourselves giving up large amounts of our energy and focus that leaves us drained, the people who take far more than they give. Find those people who you can spend the day talking about anything and everything and focusing on just mutually relaxing. And let one another know how special you think they are and reassure them that they are on the right path. I think we often look for major examples of assurance in our lives, and really it is the small acts of support which is really what we want and need. And of course the key is that you are mutually supporting one another, simply by letting them know what you think of them and spending time with them. And I will mention that a nice nature hike, enjoying the changing leaves, was a pretty great activity.

With that weekly affirmation put out into the universe, let us discuss what has happened at Dunder Mifflin.

So earlier this week, we did have what I believe is one of the greatest pranks this office has ever seen. It was conceived after Michael chose to eat an entire, family-sized chicken pot pie for lunch and then fell promptly asleep at his desk. Jim explained how we could use this opportunity to trick Michael into thinking it was actually 5pm and time to leave for the day (it was actually only 1pm). Erin was carefully to field calls away from Michael, Jim and Pam were updating the times on the clockings and his watch, and Dwight ran out to update the time in his care. We then turned the lights on and began laughing loudly to prompt him awake. This worked so he came out laughing to see what was the commotion, and noticed that it was supposedly the end of the work day and was quick to leave with us. Was this slightly unethical? Maybe, but considering Michael often wastes our time with his antics it was nice for us to do the same. But I do wonder at what point he will notice he is off by four hours.

The real event this week was the Dunder Mifflin Company Picnic, an annual event but on by the company for employees to celebrate. The concept of a company picnic tends to more exist for larger companies, I actually remember going to them as a kid for my dad’s company he worked for. One particular one had tents with music, games, drinks (for the adults), food, and then even amusement rides and other things for the kids. Smaller companies usually do not have these because they’ll likely do many events throughout the year while the company picnic is a pretty large, one-off event. There are going to be plenty of guides online on how to throw one, I am including one courtesy of Indeed to help you walk through what you wish to do. It is great to have numerous events and activities so everyone can find something that they will enjoy. Food and drink is certainly a requirement, that is what makes it a picnic. But a key piece should be allowing people to bring their friends or family. Plenty of people think of their coworkers purely as work associates, so being able to have someone they’re close to makes it a lot more fun.¹Another big recommendation I have is that these picnics are meant to celebrate employee’s hard work, and give something back to them. Which is why I am adamant it is important to splurge a bit (obviously within your budget) and make sure they can walk away with food, drinks, and fun. Let us be honest, if you are running one of these large companies you are going to be seeing the reward from record profits more than any of those employees will. So don’t be cheap when it comes to throwing these events for employees who were the source of your rewards.

The Dunder Mifflin picnic had a lot of those same aspects, with key differences between an annual sports tournament and then a performance. For the tournament, each year they have a sport event in which the employees from each branch compete for the trophy. Of course, this also includes corporate and they end to win and Charles Miner is not planning on winning gracefully. Last year was softball which we were doing okay with, until Jim freaked over finding a “dangerous” spider in his glove. I would be freaked out too but not so much that it would throw me off my game. I tend to be pretty competitive with these sorts of things, and that is a danger when it comes to the picnic if doing games like these. You still have to work with them so you want to keep the smack talk limited.

This year’s event was volleyball, which Dwight and Jim became very invested in. Between their tenacity, and Pam revealing she is pretty skilled volleyball player, we were pretty well set to sweep the game. Besides overly competitive people, the other big player you might see is like Phyllis. She was super excited and eager to play, but was very content after the first game and she realized she really was not all that interested in playing more. So she faked an injury so she could be swapped out. We made it all the way to the final game with corporate, only for Pam to trip and hurt herself. She insisted she was fine but David Wallace and Charles asserted that as this was a company event, she should not play until she has seen a doctor. Being our best player, they knew exactly what they were trying to do. Dwight told them to run to the nearest hospital and he would stall them as long as he could. And he did just that, he spent time counting to kicking the volleyball away; it was a masterclass in stall tactics. But in spire of all of that, Jim actually called and told him to swap in the subs. Oddly, Dwight made it sound like he was almost happy about it.

The other big event was a presentation towards the middle of the day in which Michael and Holly had agreed to do a performance. They’d been off working on this all day, and truthfully I was worried about Michael. He’d been nervous about running into her because he still hasn’t given up his feelings. To him, they are truly soup snakes (soul mates). True as ever before, they were able to come up with a great idea and work so well together. They created a skit combining Who Wants To be a Millionaire with Slumdog Millionaire but the questions were thematic around Dunder Mifflin. It was a pretty big hit in many ways, Stanley in particular was laughing it up like it was the greatest thing ever. Everything changed when they decided to do a question about which branch would be closed next. I guess David revealed to Michael last week that Buffalo was going to be closing. This was absolutely on Michael and Holly for thinking this should possibly be a question. But I also question David telling Michael this, if it was not publicly known then he should not be saying a word. It was at this point that the entertainment ended and the mood was pretty dismal and some of us decided to get the heck out of there.

And that, everyone, was this week’s Breakdown! Very short and sweet and certainly what I have the bandwidth for today.

I hope to have a podcast update very soon. Feeling inspired and refreshed from this week we are continuing to work on these, all while preparing to take a two week holiday soon as we return to France. Very much a busy time of the year, which is why it is so nice to find relaxing moments when we can.

Have a great weekend and as always, I’ll see you around the Breakroom!

1. (2024, November 4). Guide to Planning Successful Company Picnics. Indeed. Retrieved October 9, 2025, from https://www.indeed.com/hire/c/info/company-picnics ↩︎

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.

Good morning everyone and welcome back to the Breakroom! So has been going on this week? We’ve been diligent about getting back to the gym after a few days of struggling with motivation to get there on top of everything else that is going on. Despite being sore and tired right now, I’m still extremely happy that I was able to get out and accomplish something, because that is what counts. We were at the gym yesterday and by the time it came to the cardio we were both ready to just call it there but I was adamant that we should at least do something. I may have only did the treadmill for about 10 minutes but I still did a bit of running because I was able to find that motivation to keep going on. I like to talk about these moments because I’m sure you see the same “influencers” out there who make it look so easy for them to workout (or whatever their niche is) but they do not talk about those times that they struggle and feel like giving up. The truth is that my reader(s) are like me and that means life is hard and too often we feel like failures because our lives do not seem as easy as those of the people we see online. So how I have tackled failures in my life this week? I was passed on a couple of jobs I applied for with no interviews, I go out and apply for more jobs. My blogs are not getting the traction I want, I research new ways on how to get them out there more. I haven’t got more podcasts up, I keep on preparing for more episodes and developing my release plan so that once I start they can keep on going. They say we learn more from our failures than our successes; while that is true, it is very easy for people to say who have succeeded more than many of us so it is not easy to hear. Rather than blaming ourselves and giving up, I think a better course of action is evaluating our support system and being able to ask for help, vent about our struggles, and come back more motivated than ever. Don’t have a strong support system? Than reach out to us at the Breakdown (we are on Facebook in addition to being here) and let us find support from one another.

Besides support, we can also support you by jumping in today’s Breakdown and I have to tell you, we have some pretty big updates from the Michael Scott Paper Company.

The morning started off the same as it has been, with a paper route. Having been in operation for about four weeks, the Michael Scott Paper Company has been performing their own deliveries in the early morning before even getting to the office. Michael starts the day going around and picking everyone up in a used van that they got (which seems to say “Hallelujah Church of Scranton” on the side in Korean). Given that this has been the norm, I find it funny that Pam and Ryan still are not prepared each morning, not even bringing their own coffee for the drive. Michael is always set to go, although this is likely because he kicks off the morning with a mug of milk and sugar. No coffee with that, only milk and sugar. Needless to say, these early morning deliveries to then work a full day at the office has been taxing on them and they decide it would be wise to hire a delivery guy.

They meet up with their accountant and he has to be the bearer of bad news, and that is that they are broke. He explains that their price point they are charging is so low they losing money instead of making it. Ryan tries to explain that he, with his business school knowledge, did the numbers himself and their business model becomes profitable with enough sales. The accountant explains that in a fixed cost pricing model this makes sense but he should have used a variable cost pricing model, which seems to fly over everyone’s heads.

Here I can make use of my business degree and break these down. A fixed cost price model has the price of the product at a set rate across the board which does not change regardless of factors such as how much is produced or sold. What the accountant is combining into this is fixed costs which are costs that a company pays on their end which remain the same and are unaffected based on how successful the company is. Common examples would be rent for an office space since that is set as the same each month. On the other side is the variable cost price model in which the price of the product can and will move based on market demand, competitor pricing, and changes on production/sales. Then we have variable costs which are costs a company pays that are affected based on how much the company makes, and this is where we have the problem. So Michael Scott Paper Company makes money as they take on mor clients. However, the more clients they take on they start to require more money to spend on needs for the company, such as looking at a delivery person. And that is just today because as they take on more clients they will continue to take on more costs which will wipe them out. If they had designed their company around a variable model, they would have predicted how much is necessary and would be able to accommodate those needs.

Devastated at the news of all of this, the Michael Scott Paper Company headed back to their office to grapple with this news. Their days are numbered and now they have to deal with the fact that they are once again facing uncertainty. This is all occurring without them having any inkling with how bad it is on the Dunder Mifflin side.

Charles is in a mild panic because their branch lost another client to Michael Scott and no one seems to have any strategy. So nervous is the company that even David Wallace from corporate comes to the office to strategize the situation. For him to have come all the way here for this, it says a lot about how worried they are. So besides Charles and David, they also bring in Jim and Dwight to come up with options. Jim suggests offering a temporary price reduction for returning companies. Certainly could work but there is still isn’t much incentive for companies to leave. We have Dwight’s idea of filling Michael’s office with a swarm of bees. Not sure what the end goal is as this could just keep them from working for maybe a few days while they get the office exterminated. And then we have David who admits that their only good offer is to see if they would accept a buyout. That is where Jim comes up as they send him on down to see if he could convince them to sitting down.

Cut to Jim letting the Michael Scott Paper Company know there is a buyout option because of how successful they have been. Interestingly, Jim is relaying this information to them after Pam already revealed to him the company was in trouble, which I think we all know what Jim is doing. Marching in like victors, Michael and his team return to Dunder Mifflin in an effort to turn the turntables (or whatever Michael was trying to say).

Negotiations were pretty tense, as these sorts of things often do. Before David could even give them their offer, Michael immediately rejects it. As he explains, you should never accept the first offer which seems to include not even listening to it. David’s second offer was for $12,000 which is also declined as being too low. David tries to tear Michael down knowing full well that they cannot be that profitable and do not have a ton of time. Michael comes in with one of this greatest moments of his entire career. He points out that there is a shareholder meeting coming up soon and David will be expected to explain why their most profitable branch is suddenly bleeding money. And this might lead them to thinking they need a better CFO at the helm. I think this was David had to admit that he underestimated Michael a little too much, and offered a buyout of $60,000. I thought for sure they would take it, as it seemed that they would and were serious about it. But Michael had another stroke of genius in him, and chose to renegotiate. His terms were to have his job back and to have Ryan and Pam return in sales. David is pretty against this, besides the fact that Ryan cost the company a great deal of money but this starts to look like a multimillion dollar buyout between salaries and benefits. But he knows he is stuck and needs to get this issue resolved quickly, so he caves and the Michael Scott Paper Company is successful.

This has been a wild ride and from a personal comment as a watcher of The Office, the Michael Scott Paper Company stories is among my all time favorite arcs and I wish it lasted longer. If you were as big of a fan as I was, maybe consider getting a Michael Scott Paper Company shirt!

I hope you enjoyed this Breakdown, and I hope you all have an amazing weekend! I’ll be working more on the blog and promise to have an a update on the podcast soon. I also am officially ready for autumn over here so I may be finding a chance to pop into Spirit Halloween and Home Goods for some Halloween decorations.

As always, I’ll see you around the Breakroom.