Frivolity in the Workplace
Last night at work was dead. In 8 and one half hours, I ran two jobs, and they were not large.
So after two hours of slow, I got out my sketchbook and started to draw a dwarf by a small crackling campfire. It was at this lovely moment when a person not from my department and not a member of the management (and not a senior employee from an experience or age standpoint) approached me and gave me a job to do: breaking down boxes.
See, for every ten wraps of paper you feed into a digital printer, a lonley 11″ x 11″ x 17″ box and lid are left behind. Most of these boxes are saved to be used later, but aren’t always used later so they just pile up. The boxes aren’t heavy, and if one were to stack them up, then add to it from the bottom rather than the top, a stack of these boxes could reach all the way to the 12-foot ceilings. And there could be eight of these stacks.
When the co-worker approached me with a job, his words were, “When you have a free moment, could you tackle those boxes?”
I can’t really be blamed for what happened next.
By luck or design, there is a door right near the stack of boxes which leads to a long, if not entirely straight, hallway. Opening the door provides a solid thirty feet of runway. I wasn’t sprinting by the time i crossed the door’s threshold, but I was going fast enough and the collision was glorious. Boxes went everywhere, and there was a boom loud enough to bring the sales staff out of their cubicles.
Of course I picked up the boxes and broke them down, since that was my duty, but the experience remained a spark in my dreary evening. It was refreshing and liberating and vivacious. I hadn’t done something like that since college. When was the last time you did something like that? Crash through a pile of boxes? Karate-chop a pyramid of soda cans? Something healthier than firing a gun at a human silhouette, and more fun than punching a rope-wrapped board in your dojo?
What was your last cathartic explosion?