A late afternoon on a Thursday, I encounter a fellow colleague; Bob continues to hurriedly schedule various meetings for stakeholder engagement and requirements gathering for the engineering team. Bob initiates a standard, human-like communication protocol:
'Afternoon, Paul.' he says.
'Hey, Bob. How are you?' I reply.
'Doing alright Paul, you know how it is.' he chuckles dryly.
I do not, in-fact, 'know how it is'. This topic has been floating around within my mind palace for quite some time after I discussed it with a colleague years ago.
'How the hell do people work together for years, and know absolutely nothing about each other?' I asked.
'Listen, man. Some people just want to come to work and go home with a pay packet; that's it. Can't say I blame them either'.
We recently had some new hires on boarded to the team. I had not met all of them yet, except for a Teams meeting where all the cameras were turned off and they largely remained silent. No basic introductions were made by the person chairing the meeting, nor was there any effort made for basic social interactions.
Generally, I like to give the benefit of the doubt to people despite my skeptical nature of almost everything in the world. I would like to believe, most people are kind-natured, not-super-evil beings capable of intelligence, agency and basic socialising.
Yet, with the conversation I mentioned above paired with the Teams meeting with new hires irks me to no end.
Do people within this setting naturally want to avoid socialising? Why is it so genuinely normal to show up to a meeting, say almost nothing, never turn my camera on then leave with a curt 'good talk, guys' then disappear into another void later on?
NOTE: I do regret not initiating a round of introductions myself, in retrospect.
I completely understand the lack of interest regarding cameras during meetings and not having to contribute to every meeting, but with non-work-related activities do people actually have no interest in knowing someone they work with?
I am also guilty of this, I admit. There are days where all I want to do is sit in-front of my terminal and configure my environment to be as hacker-man as possible and not interact with another human being. There are also people I have worked with who were a genuine displeasure to be around; ones I would rather avoid than have another dealing with.
I believe most humans are naturally drawn to other human beings to some extent - we do possess ears and a mouth for just that.
I'd also like to point out that I'm not suggesting we all become super-happy best friends during the course of our professional relationship, but some basic information regarding your life and perhaps even your personality would be an ideal start as a bare minimum for someone you will potentially see 5 days a week for several years.
I think the most interesting point would be that most people would actually agree with me, yet very few would act on this.
I have worked with people in the past who were both of excellent character and smarter than myself; so not only did I have fun, I got to learn stuff too! All while being at work! Madness.
Perhaps the dystopian office hell-scapes of Office Space (1999) and Brazil (1985) are already here, and we're simply all corpo-rats in the end.
Dare I dream of a world where having colleagues you know at a basic level will make your life less dystopian?
Perhaps I am a madman, but dream on, I shall.