r/office

Why do most people rush to sit by the windows in offices and then straight away shut the blinds? (I understand if the sun is directly in your eye for a bit). But the majority of people do this and don't open it all day. Why not just sit in the middle of the office where there's no light on you/your screen? Being in an office is depressing as it is without taking away natural light and the view. When I ask them to open the blinds there's usually no problem but it gets tiring having to ask this every time I'm in the office. I don't understand the mentally of doing this. Seems illogical to me 🥲

Like if a woman and man are arguing, thee woman's same gender friend takes her side irrespective of who's right and same for a man with man.

What's the best way to tell a manager no to coming into an office to work due to gas prices?

In my job I work at two offices on rotating days. One office is a 25 mile round trip, the other is under 6 miles round trip.

Gas goes over $8 a gallon I don't want to be driving to the one way downtown. I will drive (bike in warm weather) to the one 3 miles away from me though.

How do I tell my manager this without getting on the annoying /complaining employee list?

I have been working with another team (specifically one colleague, call them Jamie) and I have created a tool for them which is now going to production, which I am not going to use, this is solely was made for their workflow.

There will be an introduction/training meeting with the colleagues who will be the users. I am a very introverted person so I don't mind that Jamie will do the talking as the first "tester" of the tool. We agreed that it will be said that I have created this tool and I would chime in if I have any further comments and if the users have any feedback or idea for further development I will work on them.

I am not really a senior person and I usually work myself. I have always had problems with not being visible enough.

I don't see Jamie would want to take my credit, I got thanked multiple times in our small team as well, and it will be mentioned I am the creator. Jamie is a nice person. Just want to make sure I get the visibility.

Any tips what to say or what to be mindful on this training call? Thank you :)

I don't do office potlucks and haven't for sometime. Today, supervisor and another employee (who suggested it) came around and said they want to have a potluck. I said I don't do potlucks, which supervisor knows, and said it will be salads and soups. I again said I don't do potlucks. The other person's asked "why?" And followed up with "just bring yourself then".

I also don't join these lunch activities. My unpaid lunch is to get out of office and away from coworkers for a blissful, relaxing 1 hour!

I don't understand why people don't understand why someone doesn't want to participate. I don't want to and don't want have to explain.

Just venting, thanks for listening (reading lol)

Office life drains you physically. Work from home drains you mentally.
At this point I genuinely can’t decide which one is healthier.

Office:

• Traffic
• Sitting for hours
• Office politics
• Exhaustion after commuting

WFH:

• Less movement
• Isolation
• Hard to disconnect from work
• Screen time all day

Both somehow end up affecting sleep, mood, and energy levels.
What work setup actually feels healthier for you long-term?

Not necessarily the chaos part lol, but coworkers you genuinely liked, funny moments during the day, inside jokes, weird but lovable people, etc.

I genuinely wonder if work environments like that really exist or if most jobs are just… depressing and exhausting. Is it realistic to hope for a workplace that’s actually fun sometimes?

I’m a woman in a male dominated field and genuinely love my job, but one coworker found my dating profile and made sure everyone at work knew about it. Since then, he and a few others keep bringing it up in a mocking, demeaning way that honestly feels more humiliating than playful. The same coworker also gives me unsolicited comments about my appearance.

At first I ignored it, thinking it would blow over, but it hasn’t. I only plan to stay here until mid-2026 and want the rest of my time to be enjoyable without creating an HR nightmare. Looking for advice on how to shut this down professionally or at least make them think twice before bringing it up again.

As a fun little shenanigan, we are having a paper airplane contest in our office on May 26 (National Paper Airplane Day), and my boss has left the planning up to me and two coworkers. Not sure of the actual budget, so we're looking for ideas for silly little prizes on the lower budget end.

There are going to be 3 zones marked down our hallway, 1 or 2 kinds of silly prizes per zone, so everyone can win a little something, and then a medal and an undecided grand prize for whoever's plane goes farthest (probably company merch or a doordash gift card), and a last place medal consolation prize for the loser.

What would be some good silly prizes that you would personally enjoy? We were thinking little classic arcade prizes like sticky hands, tiny finger hands, ring pops, other candies, etc. We're a construction company, so maybe some mini measuring tape keychains?

Any ideas are appreciated!

So we have this guy on our team, been here nine years. Knows every system, every shortcut, every vendor contact by first name. The kind of guy who fixes things before you even know they're broken.

Six months ago, upper management decides they want to "distribute knowledge" across the team. Sounds reasonable. What it actually meant was: make Jake train someone cheaper to do his job.

Jake figured this out within about a week. Said nothing. Just started training.

And I mean actually training. Thorough, patient, detailed. Showed the new guy everything. Walked him through the vendor relationships, the workarounds for the broken software nobody's replaced yet, the unwritten rules about which clients need extra hand-holding. Even wrote up guides.

Management loved it. Started making noises about Jake "moving into a strategic role" which everyone knew meant absolutely nothing.

Fast forward three months. New guy is fully onboarded. Jake gets pulled into a meeting and told his position is being "restructured."

Here's the part nobody saw coming though.

Jake smiles, says he completely understands, and offers to stay on for a full transition period. Very professional. Very gracious.

What management didn't know was that Jake had trained the new guy on how things were documented but not why. Every process the new guy learned had the steps but not the logic. So when something breaks in a way that isn't in the guide, he has no idea what to do.

Jake knew that. He documented it that way on purpose.

It's been two months since Jake left. The new guy is drowning. Three of our biggest vendor relationships are rocky because nobody knows how those contracts actually work at a practical level. We lost a client last week that Jake had personally kept happy for six years.

Management asked if anyone had Jake's personal number.

Nobody gave it to them.

The funniest part is Jake didn't do anything wrong. He trained exactly what he was asked to train. He documented exactly what they told him to document. He was professional and cooperative until his last day.

He just understood that nine years of context isn't something you can extract in three months and hand to someone else like a file transfer.

They tried to make him replaceable. Turns out they just made themselves fragile.

He's a consultant now, and he’s doing fine.

I understand if you have to take lunch late so you snack on something to hold you over. I understand if you overslept and now need to eat a breakfast sandwich at your desk. Shit happens, right?

But some people either don’t realize or don’t care that people can hear them eating. At my office we have problems with mice and are not allowed to keep food in our desk or eat while working. Some of us will have a quick snack if needed but we have lunch breaks for a reason. This dude who sits in the cubicle next to me is fucking relentless about it. Every morning, within an hour he’ll start snacking on almonds. I listen to the constant crunching until my lunch time. I’ll come back from lunch, and within an hour he’ll get out an apple and take bites every 5-10 minutes until it’s gone. His lunch break rolls around - he sleeps in his truck or reads a book. Like, I don’t care what you do with your lunch time, enjoy it how you see fit. But why do you insist on doing everything except eating while on your break, and spend the entire time you’re working, eating snacks? I am on the phone too much to wear headphones.

This bothers me because:

1. We are not allowed to eat our desks
2. I have ears and the sound of eating annoys tf out of me
3. His manager works in a different office so there’s nobody here to stop him
4. I am not allowed to say anything to him directly
5. It’s not like he doesn’t have the opportunity to eat. He doesn’t come in until 10am, and he gets an hour for lunch. Why is he torturing me?

Good lord I need my own office or to work from home. People suck so bad.

Today a coworker joined 25 minutes late and said:
Sorry, I was stuck in another call that could’ve been an email.

Honestly… fair enough.

Drop the funniest meeting excuses you’ve heard.

This is a first for me in a corporate office job, not sure if it's commonly done elsewhere. My boss said they're trying to "figure out everyone's bandwidth" and they've put together a daily task list and want everyone to time themselves on what they do, apparently they do this like every 4-5 years.

Can't lie, I have it pretty easy here. I have a good amount of down time and a hybrid schedule. All said though I don't know what direction to take this. I can tell the truth, in which case my boss will see I'm twiddling my thumbs, or I can stretch things a bit. He has a decent idea of what I do? So there is the risk he thinks I'm a liar or slow. Not saying I'd mark a 10 minute task as 2 hours, but if I doubled it to 20min... Idk.

Anyone done this kind of thing before? How'd it go for you? It's just a little stressful. I know my direct supervisor doesn't care and doesn't seem particularly enthused that we have to do this to begin with, but I could easily see people higher than him seeing these and wanting to drop some people from the team.

Worth adding they don't pay me much. I think most people would think my hourly wage warrants not giving a fuck but, besides being paid very little, this is a good gig and I'd like to stick around and keep building experience.

So I like this guy in my office.. lets call him S.. so a friend of mine who knows I like him asked him if he likes anyone and he said no.. then my friend asked directly about me and he said yes he does like me.. so my friend pushed him to send me a follow request.. he kept saying I won't accept his request bt my friend pushed and so he sent me a request on insta..

I obv accepted.. my friend asked him to text me next and he said I have no posts or stories so how does he start a conversation.. so my friend asked me to post a story so I posted a story of a movie I watched coz that is an easy bait.. he can literally ask me anything about the movie and it won't be awkward.. bt he did not text me.. he only liked my story..

Now idk.. my friend is saying he'll ask him to text me bt if my friend has to push him everytime, what's the point.. idk office relationships are messy anyway.. I'm afraid of messing things up if he notices.. idk what to do

I started a new job as head of IT at a company a few weeks ago.

Just sticking around after hours to troubleshoot an issue for one of the women on the marketing team, I'm working away on her laptop. She sent me some info I needed in our Teams conversation, so I searched my name on her laptop to pull the information... In the process of doing so, a group chat between her and the other women in her team from a few weeks ago appeared. It read:

Woman #1: new IT guy is in the office

Woman #2: ooooh what does he look like?

Woman #1: late 30s, shaved head

Woman #3: not cute, if that's what you're wondering

🙃

This happened about a week ago and I haven't been able to shake it so I figured I'd post here.
Some background, I've been at my current job for about 8 months. It's my first corporate office job after spending a few years in retail so I'm still getting used to how things work here. My manager is generally fine, not warm but not mean, just kind of a by the numbers type.
Last Tuesday we had our regular weekly team meeting, 9 people including my manager. About ten minutes in she brings up a report that went out to a client last week with a formatting error in it. Nothing crazy, a table was misaligned and one figure was in the wrong column. Fixable, not catastrophic. The client noticed and flagged it.
Instead of just addressing it generally she looked directly at me and said "that report came from your desk so I want us to use this as a learning moment for the whole team" and then spent probably four minutes walking through exactly what was wrong with it while everyone sat there looking at me or very deliberately not looking at me.
I wanted to disappear into my chair. I apologized in the meeting, said it wouldn't happen again, and she moved on like nothing happened.
Afterwards two coworkers separately came up to me and said that was uncomfortable to watch and that she didn't need to do it that way. So it wasn't just me being sensitive.
I know I made the mistake and I own that fully but I've never been called out like that in front of a group of people and something about it has just killed my confidence since then. I dread going in now in a way I didn't before.
Is this normal in office environments? Was this appropriate on her end or was there a better way to handle it because to me it just felt like public humiliation dressed up as a teachable moment