Hadley Freeman - Be Awesome - Modern Life for Modern Ladies

No doubt images of working to your own inner timetable instead of doing the 9–5 are dancing in your head: days that are peppered with spontaneous trips to museum exhibitions and mid-afternoon yoga classes in which you actually have space to do a warrior position, unlike in the overcrowded 6.30 p.m. classes in which all moves are accompanied by two slaps in the face and a kick in the butt from the people packed in next to you. Maybe you could even get on with writing that novel you’ve been thinking about for eight years but were prevented from starting by the office, yes, even on weekends, vacations and other days when you were not, literally speaking, in the office. It is still the office’s fault that the world has not been gifted with your creative talents.

But such potential bonuses are the buttercream icing on your carrot cake, the occasional brilliant guest appearance on Saturday Night Live : insufficient compensation for a dreary base. Working from home requires relying on one’s own self-discipline to work from somewhere that probably has many more distractions than an average office does as well as that cruel bitch of a siren, that battery-powered heroin: the TV remote.

If you should ever feel like maybe your home is getting a bit dull, then stay home to work one day and you will marvel at how you have been living in a veritable Disney World all these years without even noticing. Look at all these old copies of magazines you could spend the morning reading! And music playlists that need making! And old photos that require organising! (But don’t stay home two days in a row because at that point your home will start to feel more like a prison and you’ll probably have to move.)

Although the internet has now made shopping from the office possible, the threat of your boss walking up behind you generally acts as a dissuasion from clicking on net-a-porter and topshop.com more than twice an hour. The office is a similarly excellent preventative against obesity and food poisoning, if only because it is physically separating you from your fridge which, unlike the office canteen, is open for business allllll dayyyyyy lonnnnng. And, Jesus Christ, free! Free food – all day! How have you not noticed this before about your home? You would not believe how delicious that three-days-out-of-date pot of hummus will look when you have a deadline.

The downside to the free food, though, is that working from home will turn you feral. Never mind that old saw about not getting dressed until 2 p.m. if you work from home – try having to test your toothbrush for residues of wetness before opening the door for a delivery at 5 p.m. because you can’t remember if you brushed your teeth today yet or not. That’s when you know you have gone fully homeworker feral and you will probably never be fit to be socialised ever again.

In short, the office is daycare for adults. And do you know how much daycare for kids costs these days? And you’re getting this daycare, not just for free, but for minus free in that they’re paying you to be there! How totally baller is that? 7

I’m not here to help you love your job. I’m here to help you love the office. Next!

You don’t need to be a screenwriter for The Office , either the original UK or the far superior (whoa, controversial!) US version to know that there are little glimpses of joy to be found in the world of office dynamics. But you also don’t need to have worked in an office for three decades to know that ‘little glimpses of joy’ means ‘long stretches of intense irritation’.

Most humans like companionship but most humans would also like to choose who their companions are and not have to spend most of their waking hours with people they barely know and like less every day, for years and years and years on end. Arranged marriage is illegal in western countries yet at least in an arranged marriage you can get out of the house and away from your non-chosen one; there is no such escape in an office environment. In order to be able to do crazy things like eat and pay your rent, you need to spend long swathes of time with your assigned companions. 8Irritation in these instances is inevitable, but not for the seemingly obvious reason.

The truth is, the natural human condition can be summed up as, ‘increasingly irritated and resentfully unsatisfied’. This irritation comes from the gaseous formation, Irritationium, which resides behind everyone’s eyeballs and when a human begins to roll their eyes, this is like turning a doorknob and opening the door to release the Irritationium. The first thing Irritationium does is seek out its opposite force, dopamine. When dopamine floods the brain, making you happy, Irritationium immediately follows it, dulling down your happiness receptors and sensitising the parts of your brain that make you aware of being bored, grumpy and in the line that is moving slowest. This is why, by the third day of being on the holiday of your dreams, the initial appreciation of the idyllic white sandy beaches and abject self-indulgence will have faded and all you’ll be able to see is how that fat guy from room 202 always gets the best beach chair and that the waiter with the glasses never serves you first.

But Irritationium doesn’t need dopamine to work. It is just as effective with black holes or, as you know them, wasted moments of boredom that you won’t even remember at the end of the day, let alone at the end of your life. Nature abhors a vacuum and so Irritationium swiftly fills it with questions about why you ALWAYS get stuck behind the tall guy at the cinema.

Human beings need something on which to focus their irritation like they need toilets for their waste products: office colleagues are the receptacles for irritation that your entire being is constantly defecating. Thus, if one removes the colleagues from the equation, the irritation will not disappear; rather, it will merely require another receptacle and if one is working on one’s own that receptacle will be you.

Why can’t you ever focus for more than two seconds before flicking over to some stupid internet blog? God, where is that file – why are you always so freaking disorganised? You haven’t changed since you were sixteen when you would lose your bike key every other day. Jesus, it’s 11.15 – why in God’s name are you eating lunch now?

These are just some of the delightful conversations you will have with yourself – your irritating, useless self – should you work alone and out of the office. The seemingly obvious solution is to become a TWITLO, or one of Those Who Insist on Taking their Laptop Out, inevitably to a chain coffee house, Apple Mac and Starbucks mug coordinated ever so zeitgeistly. But you will find that it takes on average 7.2 seconds for the Irritationium to arrive and you will become consumed with hatred for every single other person in the café, even more so than you ever were for your office colleagues. Thereon, you will spend at least four hours of every day wandering from café to café, on the impossible quest of a café that does not possess any patrons who annoy you, but enough patrons so you don’t feel self-conscious working in the café. This is the Xanadu of the freelancer.

Just as working from home will begin to make you hate your increasingly prison-like home, so working on your own will make you hate yourself. Work in an office and your flat will be a soothing oasis, work with colleagues and you will be the only sensible one in a building full of crazies, morons and knuckle-crackers. As it is written in the Bible: ‘The path to a happy life is strewn with obsessive hatred of others and a constant mental cloud of confusion about why your obviously superior skills and insight remain unappreciated.’ All office workers know that. Right? 9