The Office

Quote of the day:
“Sixty percent of evangelicals think that Jesus was born in Jerusalem.”
--Stephen Prothero

I love “The Office.” It’s such a right-on caricature of life in an office. As I watch, I often find myself feeling a sort-of diffuse deja-vu.

As in: I’ve worked with someone like this before. I’ve encountered a situation like this before.

One of the plot lines on this week’s show involved Phyllis going to a seminar to learn how to deal with difficult people. Naturally, there are several people in “The Office” who might accurately be labeled “difficult.”

One them is Angela, who is the second-most officious person in the office. The most officious is Dwight, whom Angela is secretly having a romance with. Dwight is so deliciously deluded and over-the-top, you may feel like giving the Dwight in your own office a big hug for not being so Dwight-like.

On three or four occasions during this week’s episode, Angela makes a demand of Phyllis, who responds with her newly-learned, canned techniques for dealing with difficult people. As you might expect, in each instance, this just makes the situation much worse.

I especially enjoyed this. In my working life, “working with difficult people” was one of the many training sessions I went to. Indeed, I came away with three or four specific techniques--only one of which was a bit effective.

And it only worked for a while, if at all. There was an unreality, a phoniness to it

I remember a coworker going to an assertiveness training seminar. When she came back, her favorite word was “let’s.” Instead of saying “we need to get the program log filled out completely,” she would say “let’s get the program log filled out completely.”

For weeks, every idea or argument she used began with the word “let’s.” It got to be comical.

If you’ve spent time in an office environment, or gone to training seminars, you realize the limited effectiveness of most management training.

I’ve been through training in collaborative supervision, MBO, management through excellence, the seven steps, and several others that I can’t remember. Each had its merits.

But everything really comes down to a few simple ideas: be honest, treat others how you wish to be treated, and listen well. At best, all these systems are ways of understanding and implementing these ideas.

With the demands and stress of everyday work, we often stray from these ideas, and our effort to find our way back through new “systems” can be quite absurd.

That’s why “The Office” is so terrific. It’s an odd, joyful and hilarious show with a resonant thread of reality through it.