work, coworkers and earning a living

Working in an office is strange. It's been so long since I've done it that I forget about all the backstabbing, the factions, the lines drawn between sides.

When I started with this company, there were a handful of foreigners working in the China operation. It's a European company but they struggled their first several years in China so that when I started, they had actually closed down for many months and had just reopened.

Now it's astonishing: this single office (the main office in Asia, granted) has literally hundreds of people working here, maybe as many as 600 (no one seems to know exactly). I remember when there were less than five foreigners in the entire Mainland China operation. Now there are so many, I only know a fraction of them (and only know that fraction slightly) and there are large groups now all over Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen (and many other locations besides).

So naturally with far more people, there are far more dramas and betrayals and alliances. Though I have worked off and on for this company for 10 years (!!), I am an outsider here since I work remotely from Quebec. I stay out of the gossip and everyone watches what they say in front of me. That's fine with me: I don't have enough invested to really care about who is on whose shitlist. But it sure makes me realize how little I miss being in an office environment every day!

I don't miss all this political crap. I do miss seeing people every day, establishing relationships with co-workers. We sometimes have lunch or have drinks after work. But in all honesty, 90% of the time we are all quietly doing our work and 95% of our conversations (even away from the office) are related to work.

I miss my friends at home. Though I can't talk about work with them (most of them don't even know exactly what I do for a living!), we relate to each other because we want to, not because we are forced to interact every day.

I am just finding it odd: these forced relationships we have to negotiate. The polite banter, the joking, when the relationships are all centered around this place we HAVE to be. That's human nature, I guess (we are social beings, after all), and we all do this (myself included) to some extent, whether or not we work in an office.

But all of this is just on my mind since it's an unusual experience for me. And every day feels like a new lesson or a new kind of adventure. The "exoticism" of China is not nearly as interesting as noting how power dynamics are managed in an office full of ambitious 30-somethings.

One thing: I like feeling a part of a larger project, I like the sense of contributing to it. At home, my work sort of dissipates into oblivion once I send it off but here I can see the team that I am a part of, the ways people rely on each other every day, what happens to the work once it ends up where it's supposed to go. That's interesting. I also feel valued here, like they really actually LISTEN to my opinions about work stuff. That still surprises me!

Though it's hot here and I miss home and I wish I could come back this weekend instead of the following weekend, I am glad I have the chance to leave my bubble a few times a year and test out new skills that have gotten rusty: dealing with co-workers, for example, face to face; trying to stay awake during incredibly dull (and irrelevant) meetings; trying to be supportive but non-committal when co-workers complain about each other to me...

The pic is what is under my office at work. We work in "the tower" (so they call it) but all around us are hundreds and hundreds of cubicles (this is just one tiny wing of them). This is at 8.45am before many people had come in.

Damn, am I lucky that I don't have to do this every day! (No offense to those that do: some people love it, I realize, and most people have no choice)....

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