Working it

Giving the office your personal best

By Nina Willdorf

IT WAS PROBABLY one of the worst possible things he could have done. Two weeks after we started dating, Dave sent me a dozen red roses — at the office. Three days later, Dave and I were over.

I can hear it now, that familiar “what the hell do women want from us anyway” rant. Here’s an answer. Roses? Yes. At the office? Please. Dave’s flowers blurted out my personal business; I’m much more into a low-decibel murmur.

And believe me, I murmur plenty. Last week alone, sitting at my desk, I made three doctor appointments, I had a fight with my mom and patched it up through my dad (typical pre-Thanksgiving family opera), I fixed a banking crisis, and I set up two friends, all in between vigorous back-and-forth games of phone tag with a few pals. My co-workers, if they’d been listening, could have had a field day.

WHAT WITH today’s standard of long work hours, it’s practically impossible not to spend a healthy portion of the day dealing with personal matters. The hard part is warding off the tsk tsk of office disapproval by slyly “multitasking. ” Dave’s red roses shot that all to hell.

“About 80 percent of what I do at work is personal,” confesses a friend, who asked to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. We’ll call him Nate. And Nate’s not just talking about e-mail, a common workplace indulgence. He’s fought with his girlfriend, made travel arrangements — “I’ve done pretty much everything at the office,” he admits. So, um, do you try to hide it? “Nah. Why bother?” Nate shrugs. “My boss spends all his time dealing with baby sitters and contractors. Why should I act any differently?”

It was a good question, and I had absolutely no answer to it. In fact, I’m all for taking care of business at work. But for those of us lacking the luxury of four walls and a door, spinning the illusion of productivity while putzing around is not the easiest thing to do. When you’re all exposed to the boss, it calls for a little more ingenuity, a little more technique. For the high purpose of helping others, I took some time out from my pressing personal calls to throw together a few pointers.

Doctor appointments

Who wants that officemate across the way to know that you’ve been trying for two weeks to pass a kidney stone, and that, for the love of God, it’s time for the authorities to step in? Of course, when you’re chained to that desk, hedgy language is the onlý way to take care of this business with minimal information leakage to those within earshot. Yes/no questions, and lots of statements like “Sure” and “That works for me,” tend to do the trick. If the people on the other line aren’t being specific, a well-placed “Can you tell me what my options are?” will often allow you to say “That one!” and leave it at that. The point is to avoid vocalizing some awfully cringeworthy terms, terms like (in alphabetical order): bowel, cold sore, cyst, enema, discharge, hemorrhoid, infection, irritated, genital-anything, gyno-anything, HIV, menstrual, node, oozing, Pap, proctologist, pus, rash, wart, zit. Eeewww. No one wants to say these words, much less hear them. And you won’t have to if you master the nonspecific-questioning technique with doctors’-office receptionists. If all else fails, “I’m not quite sure what’s wrong” will get you in the door to speak a little more freely about that itchy full-body rash.

Love life

My friends and I end up doing most of our social wrap-ups chained to our desks. But that thing called discretion doesn’t stop us from finding demure ways to get the dish.

“So you went out this weekend with Tom?” I asked my friend Emily. “How’d it go? ” “Weeeelllll,” she said languidly, “he spent the night.” “No way! I need details, ” I said. But procuring those details demands some foxy phrasing. Here’s my strategy. #1: Start broadly. I usually employ high-yield yes-or-no questions to begin with, e.g., “Yes or no: did you have fun?” #2: Use ambiguous words that go both ways. “Yes or no: did you, um, you know?” or “So, did it work for you?” or “Is this going to go to the next level?” or “Were you able to broker a deal?” On her end, she uses similarly ambiguous phrases, ones like “Sure, it worked” or “We’re still working on it.” (It’s always good to throw in the word “work” while avoiding working.) By the end of our quickie conversation, Emily and I may not have been quite sure which deal went down or what exactly that deal was, but hey, at least our co-workers were similarly stumped.

Personal maintenance

Eyebrow plucking, haircuts, and the like . . . it’s the kind of thing you just want taken care of, but setting up those appointments can be so totally embarrassing. In order to avoid the potential for discovery, some people choose to take care of it themselves — at their desks. Nate, for one, keeps nail clippers, dental floss, and moisturizer within reach at all times. “What’s there to be embarrassed about?” he asks. I cringe as I picture him with clipped nails shooting every which way from his lap, splatters of moisturizer misfire dotting his shirtsleeves. But Nate says he keeps it real by using the clippers while crouched in his cube, fostering an illusion of privacy that only the telltale high-pitched clipping noises give away.

Ultimately, I have to give it to Nate. Food extraction, nail clipping, moisturizing: that’s some high-risk intra-office behavior. At any moment someone could duck in for a powwow about the latest memo, only to catch Nate midfloss. And I thought I was being all bold with my low-decibel, high-yield murmurs. Come to think of it, there seems to be a little something stuck in my teeth . . . .

“Hey, the Grateful Dead, huh? That’s pretty cool,” said Sharon with forced enthusiasm. “Were they good that night? I saw them a few years ago, but I think Jerry was already almost dead.”

“You know we don’t do any crazy stuff like that anymore,” said Virginia, patting my arm. “We’re like a boring old married couple now.”

“Yeah,” said Linda. “It’s too dangerous and scary these days. Not like a few years ago. Things just seemed a little safer then. Not so many crazy people. But you can still pretty much find anything you want if you know where to look.” A wistful look of fond remembrance crossed Linda’s face. Virginia’s eyes also started to gloss over. “Yeah, those were the days,” she murmured. “Crazy stuff.”

They were not making me feel better. A life I once considered full of experience and well-lived suddenly had a great big void right in the middle of it. Damn, I thought, how could I have missed this? I thought everything was pretty good up till now. I’ve never had any complaints, no one I’ve loved has ever had any complaints . . . but I started running back through my Rolodex of memories, trying to remember if anyone had ever said or done anything that might indicate that he was looking for something a little more . . . adventurous . . . and I was just too clueless to catch on. Fortunately, the wine had worked its anesthetic magic, and my Rolodex was locked up tight for the night.

Then, as if a light had flicked on, I realized my friends had just given me the best birthday gift anyone could ever get — suddenly, I was “inexperienced,” at least in one aspect of my life. When I walked into the café earlier that night, I’d been a veteran of life’s wars. In one short hour, I was a neophyte again. It was like setting the Wayback Machine to 16.

Thanks to my friends, I will now wear my prudishness as my own personal Fountain of Youth. My friends will probably never interview murderers. I’ll probably never consider sex a form of recreation. They look at me with awe, I look at them with awe. At this point in our lives, knowing that there’s something big and scary out there that we’ve never done, and never will, is probably the only thing holding back the onset of world-weariness that was dangerously close to consuming each of us before we walked into that café. You know, I might even try to stop saying the F-word so much.

Nina Willdorf can be found crouched under her desk, whispering into her phone about “the next level.” Until she gets fired for revealing a bit too much, she can be reached at nwilldorf@phx.com.