Where I work we have some people that don’t talk to anyone at all. They come to work , shut the door to their office in the AM, keep it closed all day and go home at 5. Is this common? Can’t recall seeing this at my last job . In fact one of these guys I barely know what he looks like , and he did not even put his name on the door. What is interesting is that 3 of them have offices right next to each other. This is a large software company and these people work on software. My last job was a similar place.
There are a couple of ghosts at my office too. No idea what they do, but they scarcely interact with anyone in person.
I recall years ago, when I was psych nursing, talking to a patient who did something similar. Never having worked in an office I was amazed.
On further questioning it turned out that, due to living alone and his non-existent social life, he could go for weeks at a time without having a conversation with another person.
Helped explain his depression.
That’s how I do my job, although I don’t work in an office. I’ll fill in my side of the small talk when I have to, but I don’t initiate it, and don’t get involved in real conversions. They’re okay people but:
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I have work to do.
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If I made Venn diagram with one circle labeled “People I work with” and the other labeled “People who talk about things I care about”…
Are you a software developer? I am, and I find interruptions very disruptive. I’m trying to juggle many things in my head as I’m writing a program. Chatter in the hall or someone coming by to make small talk causes me to lose my train of thought and it’s very easy to make a mistake. If I’m not writing code then I don’t mind chatting, but when I’m coding I would prefer to not have any interruptions at all.
In my current job I’m working with people all over the country, but no one in my building. I don’t have any work-related reason to talk to the people I physically work with. Maybe these guys are in the same situation.
I also know of some managers here who keep their door closed since they are on conference calls all day and don’t want to keep having to get up to close their door.
I do this sometimes. The more people I’m forced to share space with, the less I want to talk to any of them, ever, and the more distracting I find it when people do want to interact with me. When I stocked shelves for a living, I had an MP3 player and headphones most of the night. I was recently on a job in a place that had an open-plan office, and I was very glad I could do most of my work from home. My coworkers were all awesome, and I communicated with them just find over IM and email, but having to be in a room with a dozen people chatting and keyboards tickety-ticking put my teeth on edge. I never said anything unless someone specifically called my name.
It doesn’t mean I don’t like y’all. I’m just introverted and interacting with people is something I have to do consciously. It takes energy, and I’m trying to do work. If I’m there strictly for social interaction, like at a party or a club, then I’m as chatty as anyone else.
I was definitely this as a student all through high school. I couldn’t be quite completely invisible; I have three feet of bright titian hair. But I ran into a huge number of people in college (state school, mostly in-state students drawn largely from the city where I grew up) who recognized me from high school, but knew absolutely nothing else about me or what I did, other than perhaps my first name.
At a place I once worked, there were a couple of people who had offices in an otherwise open-plan set-up, but none of my colleagues had any idea who they were or what they did.
I was determined, on my last day there, to go up to them and say “Listen, I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but who are you and what do you do here?”, but it turns out they weren’t in that day so I never got to find out.
So they were psychic too? :eek:
That’s the only logical explanation. 
Surely I’m not the only one who has had the fantasy of being one of these guys? You go to your room, shut the door, sit at your desk, take a nap, wake up, play some HALO or some Skyrim, then read a few sites, post to the Dope, and go home. No one knows what you do, not even your boss. If anyone asks you say, 'I’m involved with monitoring and assessment of operations." And you say it like “operations” might include the person you’re talking to. Wonder how many of those guys are living the dream.
Evil Captor, I listen to a youtube commentary from a youtube account holder, and he basically gets paid to babysit a mainframe system overnight and gets to upload youtube presentations to pass time. Haha, reminds me of that Taxi episode where Alex gets bored in his night security guard job and pretends to do a talk show in his little room.
there was a new story a couple of yrs ago about an employee who died in her cubicle Friday evening and nobody knew until the following monday. I also was in positions where I had nothing in common with coworkers and was better off shutting up really.
Another gem was my former coworkers’ wife had a promotion and was pushed into the end of the hallway in her own office isolated from others. It was weird etiquette, does she come out and interrupt others? Try to see if they were free by walking back and forth from her office?
I bet the side cubicles are the worst where employees drop by and chat and waste your time. My office was massively efficient in that you would have consistent work (like an assembly line) and everyone had two breaks at same times. In fact, if you were caught chatting during worktime, supervisors would come by to tell you to shut up. During breaks folks looked forward to chatting non-work related stuff, and other just enjoyed taking a snooze or walking outside or listening to Ipods/etc.
At my place of work, I’m probably that guy. My door isn’t shut all day long though, just when I’m on a call, and only because I usually talk on speakerphone and I don’t want to disturb those that are in cubicles outside my door. I socialize a little, but not much. There are only about 12 people in our office but I am rarely involved in their day-to-day conversations. I have work to do, so I stay in my office and do it.
At our holiday gatherings it’s kind of a joke, how they have to bring me up to speed on everything that’s happened in the last 12 months because I didn’t know about it at the time.
Carl Gordon-Jenkins Gordon-Jenkins.
It sounds like something that happens at big companies. I’ve mostly worked in consulting firms where a significant amount of your performance was tied to either billable hours or how much work you sold. So IOW, upper management would soon see on the utilization report that an “invisible employee” wasn’t billing any hours and they would be conselled out if it went on long enough.
That said, in some of the bigger firms like IBM or the Big-4 firms (Deloitte, E&Y, KPMG, PwC), it can actually be difficult to NOT become invisible. People travel around to clients a lot or work from home so it can be difficult to actually even see people who you need to build relationships with.
Well, I can certainly see why you are so anti-capitalism.
Not in an office but there was an infamous (if you lived where I lived) incidence of a woman who was never seen at work when she was supposed to be at work. She was known to have a mobile phone and smoke, so other staff would assume she was either off somewhere yakking on her phone, or out having a fly cigarette.
Turned out she wasn’t doing either, she just wasn’t turning up for work at all. She got away with it for years because all her co-workers disliked her intensely and didn’t follow up on why no one ever saw her at work, they were just relieved not to have to interact with her!
She’d been taking home around IRE£500 a week - and this was in the days when IRE£500 a week was a helluvalot of money. She got away with it as well because her employer was too embarrassed to do anything other than allow her to discreetly leave. I found her on Facebook a while ago and she’s got “manager at <name of place> from <years>” listed on her profile. She wasn’t the manager.
I also heard about a video rental shop where the employees came up with a scam. The company had a policy that branches in city locations had to have a minimum of 2 members of staff on duty at all times. So the staff worked out a roster where there were 3 members of staff named as being on duty but only two of them would turn up and would cover for the third should any Powers That Be turned up or rang the branch. As far as I know the company never copped on. the branch closed a few years ago as it wasn’t making any money!!