to ask you what you do 'in the office'?

[Crevix]

i was reading cosmo and realised i have no idea what happens 'in the office'.

why do you need special clothes? do people really have 'office romances'? and 'office parties'?

and what sort of work is done 'in the office'?

I get into my office at about 7.45 to make sure that everyone else is on time. I have a strange tic which causes my eyes to jolt to the wall clock whenever I sense someone coming in late. Its noted.

I spend my day running projects, typing documents, having meetings, dealing with enquiries, sneaking onto mumsnet talking to clients, writing reports, ignoring reading and responding to hundreds of emails until I am the last to leave, safe in the knowledge that no one sloped off early, particularly anyone who was in late.

My staff do what they are told, make me coffee and secretly hate my guts.

I love my job!

I'm only partly in an office. But we Fill in forms mainly. Then copy them & file them. Also answer phones & get yelled at.

PS I wear full business dress - suits, dresses, jackets, heels the works. Everyone else wears smart-casual.

The staff think its a power thing. Little do they know that the rest of my clothes are covered in snot, sick, paint, squashed biscuit and mucky hand prints made by my small children!!

Crevix, as a midwife do you not have any admin/paperwork to do or any experience at all of desk-based life, using computers etc? I don't mean to be sceptical or anything, am just interested as I didn't think anyone got away with NOT doing paperwork/using a computer in any job these days.

Work avoidance takes place:
Reading your emails and deleting all the round robin ones
Trying to open, close and save files
Trying to find features in Windows 7 which you knew in XP
Messing about with Word Powerpoint and Excel
Readjusting your workstation/docking station
Going to lunchtime talks about office safety etc, for which you get sandwiches
Getting snacks from canteen
Talking to people at the printer/ coffee machine
Readjusting the blinds/curtains
Going on the long walk to the basement to get a new pad of post-it notes
Browsing the internal intranet
Trying to arrange meetings or speak to someone on the phone
Trying to print things
Having cakes if it's someones birthday, or last day, or a Friday

I am amazed any work at all comes out of our office. But I think with these skills I could do any job in any office

babyheave - why don't you make your own coffee?

I try to avoid going intou our office as it is a hotdesk room and you grab whatever computer you need to answer your e-mithers, update your calendar and anything else.

In our office anything goes dress wise. Now it is warmer I have been wearing longer denim shorts and t shirts with sandals, in winter it is old jeans and hoodies. Our head of service just wears chinos and a loose shirt and usually has a pipe hanging out of his mouth. A lot of the wome are in strappy tops and shorter skirts now.

We don't do smart unless we are going to a presentation or an important meeting. Then who ever has dressed up is usual the centre of a bit of ribbing (eh what's up? you up in front of a judge this afternoon or what!!)

Office chat is about everything from conspirecy theories to random silliness. There is a lot of piss taking, mockery and good humour. As far as I can see everyone gets on with everyone and most have workked there 20 years plus.
We have had a new team join us but as we have already worked with them a lot over the years they have just slotted in no problem.

Our place of work is great!!

i do vast huge enormous piles of documentation and paperwork but in short bursts, often one handed while doing 4 other things with the other hand and trying to drink cold coffee at the same time. after elbowing various colleagues out of the way to get to the computer which is linked to the right printer, then moving on to a different computer linked to a different printer. then i copy it all down in handwriting in 17 different places, and file all the duplicated bumf in 14 other places.

i like the sound of wednesday's office.

and i get to wear pyjamas in public.

Papers papers papers papers papers. Papers to brief for meetings, papers to be read in meetings, papers to support the briefing papers, papers with speech notes for the meeting chair, action papers after the meeting, minutes after the meeting, supplementary amendments to the minutes, accompanying papers. Paperspaperspaperspaperspapers.

There is fuckall romance except one very important fellow took a besotted shine to me once and took me for tea and buns.

It's far from an ordinary office, though. We all eat together in a vast wooden-vaulted Gothic dining hall where we must cover our shoulders and there are various arcane rules and rituals. And there is a lot of seething resentment and, on my part, a lot of sneakily printing out my studies on the office printer.

Well it depends on what business 'the office' supports. Being 'an office' is not itself a way of generating income
.

In my office I answer enquiries over the phone ranging from 'how can I pay my council tax online ' to 'what's the answer to this crossword clue'

I type up agendas and minutes for meetings

I input statistics for events ie how many mums and babies turn up for ryhmetime each week

I email suppliers to order new book titles , DVD titles etc

I wear casual smart ie nice jeans and nice top

offices can be very different depending on what area of the business you are in

i am used to working in and IT dept as i am a developer(scruffy clothes, laid back programmers who play golf at lunchtime, good banter and a few oddballs that make life interesting)

but at the moment im working in finance (leaving in 8 days to go back to an IT dept though yay!) and it is so different, and so bitchy! its dog eat dog in here, every man for themselves in finance

and if a person is 'in business' what does that mean?

or 'in the city'?

I sit on mumsnet and stare out of the window until it's time to go home.

'in the city' is finances I think
also lawyers maybe

business could be anything from running a local garage to running a national newspaper, all businesses. Some eBay traders are businesses

Crevix, do you know about Parkinso's Laws? (Developed a good few years ago).They just about sum it up.

Parkinson?s Laws

Parkinson's First Law: Work expands to fill the time available.
Parkinson's Second Law: Expenditures rise to meet income.
Parkinson's Third Law: Expansion means complexity; and complexity decay.
Parkinson's Fourth Law: The number of people in any working group tends to increase regardless of the amount of work to be done.
Parkinson's Fifth Law: If there is a way to delay an important decision the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it.
Parkinson's Law of Sience: The progress of science varies inversely with the number of journals published.
Parkinson's Law of Delay: Delay is the deadliest form of denial.
Parkinson's Law of Data: Data expands to fill the space available.
Parkinson's Law of Meetings: The time spent in a meeting on an item is inversely propotional to its value (up to a limit).
Parkinson's Law of 1000: An enterprise employing more than 1000 people becomes a self-perpetuating empire, creating so much internal work that it no longer needs any contact with the outside world.
Mrs. Parkinson's Law: Heat produced by pressure expands to fill the mind available, from which it can pass only to a cooler mind.

I rather enjoy the cosy banality of it all, the crappy lighting, the battered desk, the group moans, the petty politics.

it does make a terrible mess though.

i long for ironed, tailored clothes and smooth glossy hair. and a briefcase. and luch.

Ha ha ... I am a bit like babyheave!

I get to work at 8.30, having travelled for two hours by car, train, tube and bus. I wear a suit (normally dress and jacket) or trousers and a top, unless it is Friday and I can't be bothered so I wear jeans (smart ones tho). I get a coffee and some breakfast on the way in and eat it while my PC starts up and I check what's in my calendar for the day and make a start on the deluge of emails that has somehow landed since 6pm the previous day.

My team start to trickle in at about 9am, and should all be there before 10am. Like babyheave, I keep a general eye on the times people arrive, particularly because a lot of my staff are fairly young and are living alone in London for the first time and I feel responsible for them. Would hate to think of them lying ill in some hovel with nobody knowing!

From about 10am, my day really gets going and I have meetings to attend or lead. The ones I lead all start late and feel rushed, the ones I attend waste loads of time because they're the ones someone up thread rescheduled a thousand times to accommodate important people and I never get to hear about the cancellations until I arrive.

The day muddles along with meetings and emails (which could be as simple as an annual leave request, a there's-cake-in-the-kitchen notification or a request for some urgent work for the political leaders of our country. The easy ones always arrive when I have lots of time and the urgent important ones arrive at 5.30pm or the day before my annual leave starts. I talk my team about their projects, dish out new work, hold appraisals, lead team meetings, attend corporate meetings, balance a big (scary) budget, update my boss on everything, approve invoices, check my contractors are doing broadly what I expect them to be doing, evaluate the (many) suggests my contractors make and try to identify the ones that will help us and don't cost too much on amongst the ones that are just a money-making scheme for the contractors firm, scout for new customers, placate the customers we already have .... stuff like that really.

At some point near the middle of the day, I have lunch in the work canteen, at my desk from a sandwich shop, it in the park alone or with team.

I leave at about 6pm, after most people. Reverse my 2 hour journey, eat and get to bed.

You might ask why I bother with all that. My answer is that it funds my weekends and holidays in a nice house outside of London, gives me job security, a pension and a sense of purpose.

Having said all that, I'm on maternity leave at the moment! No idea what I'll do when I go back - probably, like babyheave, I'll do it all whilst trying to minimise the amount of babysick that makes it onto the work clothes. I do hope to reduce my hours in the office though.

Phew. That's what goes on in my office

I have my own office. Well, sort of.

I'm an admin in an old victorian mansion. My office used to be the toilet, it comes complete with frosted glass. I share it with a file cupboard that is used by other staff members.

I type letters, keep files, minute meetings, do A LOT of financial 'stuff' and answer phones. I wear whatever I like but try to keep it smart although on Monday I wore capri pants and tshirt as it was a bank holiday and no one else was about.

This is my last day here. From Monday I move to a new job in a new huge communal office. I'm looking forward to the company!

Work does give one an excuse for dressing nicely.
As a child it mystified me how my mother looked at clothes and said 'Ideal for work'.
Now I get it.

"In the City" means the square mile. I worked in the "City" for the first 25 years of work and I worked firstly in the Insurance sector and the for a Charity. Now work for a car dealership in Essex.

All offices have been very different, mainly the same type of clothes semi smart, but very different type of people in each industry. My jobs have all been numbers based so a lot of typing numbers into computer, writing system reports to get those numbers out again.
While I worked for the charity a lot of my work was from home, so the office was my spare bedroom, where i did my work in my nighty some nights and listened to the radio.

Now I have a car workshop outside my office which still seems a bit odd to me, after so many years working in non manufacturing sector.

I work in an open plan office which consists of 3 main departments with a secretarial pool. The departments are sat together with generally a fire exit or a large partition in between departments.

We have a smart casual dress code unless we are meeting clients in which case the "RULE" is to never be more underdressed than the client and business dress is considered the safest option. Smart casual is generally a knee length dress with heels, a skirt and vest with smart cardigan (I don't do blouses) or trousers with the same kind of top. And always heels. Short skirts, jeans, bare midrifs, trainers, t-shirts and sandals are expressly forbidden although some of the secretaries staff push the boundaries!

I get into the office and turn on my computer then offer to get tea/coffee for whoever is in the office and sitting in my department. I then sit down with my coffee and look at my emails and BBC.co.uk (if no urgent emails to answer). I then get on with looking at lots of documents which have been emailed to me or are contained of various secure databases and prepare reports summarising the information in those documents and researching any issues which I identify in those documents (so that I can describe them accurately in my reports) or doling out bits of research to specialist teams and then when they report back to me, incorporating their conclusions in to my reports. I send the reports for review, answer any queries and then send them out to the client. Sometimes I then have follow up discussion with the clients or people who want to buy the client based on the information contained within the reports.

Sometimes I prepared presentations for training courses or recruitment events and I spend far to much time in internal meetings listening to fools who have nothing to say but feel the need to say something and preparing excuses as to why I have not met my ridiculous targets (which no-one actually cares about anyway). I fill in a time sheet each week listing every hour that I have spent on certain pieces of work and I definitely submit my expenses claim!

In between, people come and chat, sometimes a large department discussion breaks out about something on the X-factor/BGT/the RW etc etc etc people get teas and coffees, people come and go from other offices, people bring in sweets from holidays, we bitch about people calling in sick "yet again", we speculate about the office being closed and people being made redundant, we complain about how much the partners earn, how unreasonable the clients are.

We have a couple of office parties a year - Christmas and our internal "year end". These are generally pretty good fun and we tend then to go on elsewhere. At the end of every month the firm also puts a credit card behind one of the bars in town for a good night out. Office romances tend to be restricted to the new graduate crowd - the rest of us are much staider and married to people we met in our own graduate crowd but on the occassions that these things do happen (among the non-graduate crowd) they are generally explosive, tragic for those involved and often very career limiting (mostly for the women).

Phew!

Is it frequented by fit blokes in a state of semi undress Briff?