You know what really pisses me off? When some lifeless, faceless corporation uses the whole “we’re like a family” thing to sell their sense of “culture” to prospective employees. Listen, like most people I know, I saw this as an open invitation to verbally abuse, gaslight, mistreat, and humiliate my way into the kind of working environment that I’m allegedly supposed to be emulating.
But apparently if you berate Linda from accounting for her obvious alcoholism and poke fun at her weight in an effort to “make her feel at home,” you get called to HR before you can even make Derek cry at the holiday potluck when you passive-aggressively suggest that his buffalo chicken dip is a carbon copy of the version that you saw on Allrecipes so everybody knows he’s a fucking fraud whose incapable of thinking for himself.
I don’t get it. If this workplace really had the family environment it’s boasting, then how come every time I lock myself in the bathroom and say “This time I’m really going to fucking do it” after every single perceived slight from my peers or management, I’m given a pamphlet about the benefits of our employee mental health assistance program? Since when is any self-respecting authority figure supposed to be interested in my well-being?
Maybe I’m old fashioned, but team-building exercises, like most family outings, are supposed to involve bringing up that time a certain someone peed themselves on the haunted hayride because nobody took their request for a bathroom break seriously. And now you’re telling me that not only are bathroom breaks encouraged, but actually mandatory every 90 minutes? Casual humiliation about traumatic events that become core memories of resentment is supposed to be a part of the process, and if I can’t get my jabs in, then what’s the point of even returning to the office?
Instead, I keep hearing this bullshit about “a healthy collaborative environment where you feel comfortable in your own skin,” which makes absolutely no sense. If you really want me to feel like I belong here, then promise me you’ll take me out for ice cream after the company softball game, and leave me standing in the rain for 3 hours because your old college friend is in town and you forgot to pick me up.