Office Shenanigans

As I sit here today toughing out my 9 hour shift (with no breaks), I'm counting down the minutes before I can leave. Working in an office can sure be BOR-ING! Being part of the admin staff, combined with our much younger age (when compared to the rest of the staff) can make this a lonely/boring place. The adjusters all love to socialize with each other, but rarely come to us...which I'm not complaining about. If you remember THIS post, you'll know why.

Anyway, desperate times call for desperate measures. Sometimes I just have to create my own fun. Here's something I did a while back to try to stir things up:

We have one adjuster who clearly doesn't have much work to do and often wanders around the office, opening drawers, files, cabinets, etc. that don't belong to him. It's clear he's just trying to waste time and snoop around. It's common to hear him in other people's cubicles and I've even caught him snooping in mine. Sometimes Melissa (the other admin here...yes, there are two of us) will ask him if she can help him find something, knowing well that he's not looking for anything in particular. He just gets a nervous look on his face, shuts whatever he was snooping in, says "nope", and goes back to surf the net in his office.

Well, this particular adjuster used to be in charge of a program and all of his files were green. After a few years of working with him, I noticed that he ONLY used green paperclips in his files. Eventually I saw that he was stealing all of the green paperclips from the storage bin. He even began stealing them from our desks. I have no paperclip preference, so I wasn't particularly bothered by this, but I DID see it as an opportunity to mess with him. Over then next few days, I made it my mission to collect and hide EVERY green paperclip in the office.

I was nervous about his reaction, this may be an obsessive compulsive action and I could be creating a big problem by messing with his routine, but I couldn't help myself. I soothed my conscience by calling it an "experiment".

The result wasn't nearly as thrilling as I'd hoped. Though I didn't want him to throw a fit, I did wish he would come and ask me to order more green paperclips, just to show his dependency on them. Instead, he started using only silver paperclips. I suppose if you can't match exactly, the next best thing would be to get a neutral.

Eventually I put all of the green paperclips back and he started using only green ones again.

Kind of anticlimactic, I know. But I so enjoyed being sneaky and waiting to find out how he'd react, I just had to mention it.