Office Space Edited Reaction - Early Access (Patreon)
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I was expecting Office Space to be relatable, but I wasn't expecting it to be THIS relatable!
I've been work from home since 2020, but I worked in an office before then, where I experienced A LOT of what this movie was making fun of. Thankfully I'm no longer with the company in question, but my God, it was a shitshow at times. My grievances with that place are long, all the way from being told that the women in the office (of which there were 3 at the time) should be the ones cutting the birthday cakes because we're the women and it's "mean" to make a guy do it, to being told if we leave on time that we're not committed to the company enough (and if we dare make breakfast ie a toasted bagel in the morning, it's time theft), to my coworker studying up on MGTOW during office hours and nothing being done about it even when we bring it up to management. Oh, and did I mention one of the ways they "solved" a case of sexual harassment one of the ladies in the office was receiving was by moving the perpetrator's desk a little bit farther away from hers? Without even telling him why? Just that there weren't enough wall outlets, and so he needed to move? Or something?? She quit shortly after that because OF COURSE she did. Oh, what about that time that a new employee who worked there for less than a week was YELLED AT for going to the washroom and publicly bawled his eyes out before never coming back? Or the other guy who worked there for a half a day and quit by lunch, texting his manager that it was "the worst place he had ever worked." OR the time the CFO told my room, where 3 of the only women worked, tha twe needed to get a man in there because we would talk too much without one. It was a mess! But here's a secret: I still use their Grammarly account because they never changed the logins lol.
I mention also missing things about office life, and if you've read the above, you're probably wondering how that could be, but it's true. I adored many of my coworkers. We were the only reason we all stayed as long as we did, and I still miss them terribly, even though we had a bit of a falling out. Not to the point where we can't hit each other up, but to the point where we haven't. We would often go out to the bar after work to commiserate into the early hours of the morning, spend our lunches playing Exploding Kittens, and do Game of Thrones fantasy pools while the newest season was airing. I was lucky to have them, and they made the above paragraph bearable. But, unsurprisingly, when the pandemic struck, and we no longer had unfiltered access to each other, we all left the company for greener pastures.
Office Space reminded me so much of this time in my life, and I'm pleasantly surprised with how well they captured the spirit of office work. Even though my experiences of it came nearly 20 years later, it was still extremely validating.