Friday, January 23, 2015

Laughing at Our Own Misfortune

At work on Tuesday, I was invited to go to lunch.  Since I'm on a budget, I take my lunch to work, but I decided to join in as a way of building comradery with my coworkers.  It was my boss, someone temporarily visiting from the Brazilian office, and an intern.  They've been getting lunch together for the last week, so it was nice of them to invite me to tag along.

Before we went to the restaurant, he had to make a stop at a print shop -- our office does have pretty good printer, but they needed something nicer for an upcoming trade show.  Well, the employees at the print shop were both lazy and incompetent: we asked for them to print the pieces we needed, so they directed us to the self-service printers, despite not knowing how they worked.  It took three times as long for us to do the job with their help than it would have if they had just done the job themselves in the first place.

The rest of the lunch break was spent talking about the lousy experience we had had.  It wasn't all complaining, either -- a lot of jokes were made and we generally had a good time sharing the experience together.  For this reason, I was happy to have accepted the invitation to go to lunch.  Yes, half of the people involved won't be here very long, but this experience is now something that my boss and I can look back at and laugh together.  I like this job because I'm really growing professionally, but it's nice to also be more comfortable socially with the people I work.  If one of those people happens to by my boss, well, that's certainly not a bad thing.

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