Office
Aug 10, 2023
Every time I go to my girlfriend Xiaoxi’s office, there’s more plants. All of the corners and surfaces that it makes sense to place plants are already occupied, but Xiaoxi’s boss keeps buying them, so potted plants fill the entranceway and bathroom.
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From what I can gather, watering plants is the only part of Xiaoxi’s job that she likes. Her boss claims the plants are dying from being watered too much. Xiaoxi doesn’t have to come in everyday, so on days she’s off her boss goes from coworker to coworker, whispering in their ears that the plants are being overwatered. As a result everyone treats Xiaoxi like she has a drinking problem, trying to intervene and get her to stop watering these plants before it does her in. I don’t really get it though. All the pots have drainage holes at the bottom. The tips of their leaves are brown. The soil is dry. It doesn’t really seem like overwatering to me.
As I write this, there’s only the two of us here at the office. Xiaoxi’s boss is away for vacation, and when she’s away there’s no reason for the other coworkers to show up. Xiaoxi had to make copies, so she wanted to use the office printer. We got here around 1pm, climbed up three flights of steps, and turned on the air conditioner. Xiaoxi lit some incense and did a little bow at the shrine in the corner of the office. Now, 4 hours later, her copies are finished, every document is stamped with the appropriate seals, and we’re sitting on the floor eating vegetarian sushi.
Living in a big city, everywhere I look there’s office buildings, and they’re all off limits to me. You need to scan a card or buzz an intercom to get in. I’ve worked at an office before, but even then, the office life still feels like a distant fantasy to me. Only when Xiaoxi brings me here can I more concretely imagine having a real job, working until 2am every night, calling into meetings with clients in France.
Other offices I’ve been to include a contractor with the FDA in Washington DC that some lady off of OkCupid brought me to so we could watch K-Dramas together at 11pm. She urged me to go into the bathroom to marvel at the fact that it had a shower, then bragged about crying in the bathroom stalls every time her boss yelled at her.
In my personal life, offices have only ever been static moments in time. I may be vaguely aware of the history they had before me and I suspect they’ll have history after me — but I can’t really even hazard a guess about what any of it could be. The knowers of said office’s history don’t care enough to tell me about it, and I’m too nervous to ask too many questions. I’ve never worked in an office for more than a year, so the most change I’ve seen is on the same order as Xiaoxi’s office’s gradual accumulation of plants.
It’s only through movies like We Couldn't Become Adults that I can even imagine the evolution of office life. The film follows a guy working for a graphic design agency, going back in time from the very first days of the pandemic in 2020 to the late 90s when he had just started working. We gradually see the big fancy company he works for with its iMacs and long spacious desks fade back into a tiny miserably cramped CRT world, that somehow in the future that was our point of departure becomes an object of the protagonist’s nostalgia. As the technology gets older, the protagonist and his boss become younger, and relationships that seemed distant and inscrutable are revealed to have their basis in decades-old office brotherhood.
In my case, I’m worrying I’m growing too old to ever feel those sorts of nostalgia someday. I’m 26 and I still don’t belong to any organization. I have no bros who I work with during the day and get drunk with every night. I don’t even know what it means to be a bro. The seeds of office-life are unplanted, and that particular soil grows dryer and dryer every year.