Workplace Motherfuckers

I’ll be turning fifty this August, and entering a phase of life where I want to be very clear-eyed about how I choose to invest my time. With respect to work, I don’t want to be expected or asked to tolerate even a single motherfucker. As I’ve written before, being very computer is hard. You need routines. You need some basic happiness scaffolding in place. Workplace motherfuckers eat away at that scaffolding at a rate that exceeds your ability to replace/ rebuild it. Mere assholes degrade the scaffolding, but at a slower rate, allowing you to rebuild and fortify. So, who exactly are these workplace motherfuckers?

Workplace Motherfucker characteristics

• coworkers who struggle with executive function and self regulation – with tasks like: 

  • being courteous to others as a default setting – without the expectation of praise

  • understanding the meaning of common words used by people who do computer work, and who graduated from middle school – words like agency, autonomy, and collaboration among others

  • being able to imagine scenarios where they are not at the center of all things

  • listening to people while simultaneously not trying to complete their sentences 

  • being aware that repeatedly being a motherfucker (in the ways described above) will cause non-motherfuckers to reflexively react with 220 volt WTF thunderbolts shooting out of every orifice

• coworkers who, if fired and replaced by any random person, would immediately produce this reaction in 10 out of 10 people… It’s about time motherfucker!

• coworkers who, if allowed to roam around a New York City subway station for an hour, would produce this reaction in 10 out of 10 people… goddamn motherfuckers

• coworkers whose style of communication and basic assumptions about the world are so different from yours, it often feels as though you grew up in different epochs of human civilization 

• coworkers who, if they were among a group of plane crash survivors, would be the most likely to eventually steer the entire group toward an orgiastic freefall of nihilistic sexual debauchery, violence, and ultimately cannibalism

• coworkers who, similar to David Schwimmer’s character in Band of Brothers (lieutenant Sobel), would likely be killed by their own men in a combat situation

The rat shit in Crème brûlée gedankenexperiment

I’ve learned that it only takes one workplace motherfucker to offset all the positive effects you might enjoy at an otherwise sterling job: great pay and benefits, interesting technical challenges, a high number of talented and delightful people. Workplace motherfuckers who happen to be in management have an additional power: they can poison work by forcing you to always choose from a lousy set of options, while refusing to acknowledge any responsibility in their small and large acts of motherfuckery – like visibly scooping up a teaspoon of rat shit, pouring it into a not-quite-congealed creme brulee, applying a torch to it, then handing it to you with a fucking spoon. The workplace motherfucker would say:

Workplace motherfucker: “It’s crème brûlée! What’s the problem? Just eat it.”

Any normal person: “You just put rat shit in there mothefucker.”