I think it’s been established by now, that I am a horribly self-indulgent whining bastard with an amazing talent for ranting about every single pointless non-issue in my life. I got a good ten yards of blog entries to prove it, right here.

BUT, I pride myself in that you will never hear me, in the middle of a regular conversation with friends, start detailing excruciatingly dull and meaningless minutiae of my work life: how such or such project is not coming along as we expected and how I can’t stand the girl from accounting and so on and so forth.

I might mention some work-related items or geeky stuff somewhat connected to work every once in a while, since after all, work is quite a central part of my life (well, until that massive cocaine deal goes through, that is: after that, I’m off to retirement for good).
Informal roundup of long time friend’s careers, idle “how was your day” chat and the like: it’s all good.
But do I ramble endlessly about the finer points of project implementation, the mediocre sex life of complete strangers that I happen to work with, or the new color of my office wallpaper: nope.

NOT, mind you, out of some stupid altruistic consideration for my friends and their understandable lack of interest for discussing the intricacies of somebody else’s work, for which they do not receive a salary. Once again: I’ll gladly bore to death anybody with the most pathetically mundane details of my life provided I got enough rope at hand.
No. The reason I do not bask in office stories when going out with friends is that It is only a fucking JOB.
Call me vain, but no matter how I might actually enjoy doing my job, I am still glad to be done with it at the end of the day. And I DO like my job. doing a job I am happy to do is, along with reaching a complete moratorium on the presence of any alarm clock in my bedroom, the only lifelong professional ambitions I have ever had: in that regards, I can safely say I am quite a successful man, since I haven’t owned a sound-enabled time device in many years now. I like my job, but I like doing other things even more, ok?
Seeing how the goal of my day is usually to get my work done with, so as to be able to partake in other occupations that are not work, no matter how similar in practice, I don’t see why I would ever want to drag work along once I’m done. If I wanted to keep feeling at work, I would not be sitting in a bar with a beer in my hand, I’d be in my cubicle (ok that’s an image: I don’t have a cubicle and my office is about 5 feet from my bed, on my couch, previously dragged in the middle of our 2-square-feet garden if the sun is shining).

I don’t bore other people with petty work-talk because it also bores me. And I pretty much expect the same selfish courtesy from my, otherwise fondly cared for, friends. If I keep switching the topic off that latest xml scheme you’ve been fighting about with your boss, onto the hairdo of the blonde next to us, it’s not because I really care about scary 80’s soap opera fashion revival, it’s because I am desperate and about to kill someone if the word “project flow” is uttered one more time when I’m drinking a beer.

So in the future, unless your job is absolutely fascinating (and I do mean fascinating, as in I-hunt-and-trade-albinos-unicorn kind of fascinating, not I-improve-workflow-productivity-for-major-corporation-XYZ-foreign-exports-division kind of fascinating), please just stick to the skinny and assume by default that I really do not want to hear about the woes of your IT department when they tried to upgrade all the PCs to Windows 2006. To put it bluntly: I don’t care. And I know you probably don’t care about whatever else I might launch the conversation on, but at least, it is not work. And that’s good enough for me. And please don’t get pissy if I finally clue you in on the level of tear-inducing boredom of your work-related topic of predilection: I don’t hate you, I love what you got to say, but come on, you are better than that, I’m sure you can discuss non office-life-related matters with the same brilliant insights and exciting details that flourish when relating your boss’s secretary last fling with another [equally unknown to me, likely to remain so for the rest of my life and therefore of no interest whatsoever] workmate.

PS: If you are a friend reading this and we’ve gone for drinks and chat in the past few days: I’m not talking about you of course, I’m talking about all the others.
PPS: To my parole officer and my buddies at the twelve-step program: I know I screwed up. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought back that pack of red bulls from Barcelona. I thought I was stronger than the Can now. I thought I could control it… I was in denial, I know.
But I swear I’ll stop soon as soon as my paxil prescription comes though. Just one more can, and I stop. Promise.

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