Bob Goldman
Are you the best-looking person in your office?
Let’s find out.
Do your coworkers make goo-goo eyes when they pass you in the hallway? Do new employees snuggle their trays next to yours in the company cafeteria, even when it’s Meatloaf Monday? Do the IT people rush to fix computer problems when you report them, sometimes even in the same month?
If you answered. “Oh, my gosh, that happens to me all the time,” you could be an Office Ten.
As writer Danielle Cohen explains in a recent issue of New York magazine, an Office Ten is “a person who falls somewhere between average to mildly good-looking in the world at large but skyrockets to wildly attractive within the confines of an open-concept desk plan.”
It’s the transformative nature of the Office Ten that makes it so exciting and so dangerous — both to the Office Ten and to the co-workers who drool over them. You need a smart three-point strategy to help you deal, and here it is.
No. 1: If you want to stay an Office Ten, stay in the office.
Like the elegant Count Dracula, who transforms into a blood-sucking monster the moment he steps out of his castle, the moment an Office Ten steps out of their office, they turn into an Out-of-the-Office Five (or Four, or Two).
This is why an Office Ten will want to spend as much time in the office as possible, enjoying the adulation of their co-workers.
Be the first to arrive in the morning. (It’s perfectly OK to show up to work in your PJs. On an Office Ten, everything looks good.) Though you will receive endless invitations, never ever go out to lunch. Seeing the face on your lunchmate turn from adoration to repulsion as they watch you cruising the buffet table at the Smorgy Bob’s will be disheartening — almost as disheartening as the Ham & Bananas Hollandaise.
You will also need to think up excuses to stay late at work. You could explain that you want to go over your report one more time, because your high standards demand nothing less than total perfection, but coming from you, no one will believe it. A better reason to stay late is because your home is overrun with rabid chinchillas and you’re waiting for the pest-control company to round them up.
Coming from an Office Ten, it’s an excuse everyone will believe.
No. 2: Recognize your role as a fantasy creature.
In fantasy sports, players recruit real athletes to be on their imaginary teams. As an Office Ten, you have been recruited by your co-workers to be part of their fantasy team at the office. And considering how awful your office is, who can blame them?
Office Tens represent “desires we fabricate to make our work lives more interesting,” writes Danielle Cohen.” What else could make dragging your bleary body into a half-vacated zombie of an office sound remotely appealing?”
Your responsibility to fulfill the fantasy life of your coworkers could include telling tall tales of vacation adventures, like climbing K2 in your house slippers, or using a can opener to fight off a pirate attack while single-handing your yacht across the Strait of Malacca.
Just don’t get so carried away that you slip into true-life adventures, like the time you nabbed the last container of nonfat cottage cheese the day before your 10-cents-off coupon expired.
Depending on how desperate your coworkers are for excitement, it could work, but I wouldn’t push your luck.
No. 3: Resist. Resist. Resist.
With everyone at work going moo-moo-goo-goo over you, you could be tempted to indulge in a little coworker canoodling.
You must resist.
You don’t need me to tell you the risks of any office relationship that goes behind sharing a box of paper clips. For the Office Ten, the consequences can be much more serious, since even an illicit snuggle, when conducted outside the office, can lead to something truly disastrous, like your former admirer, shaking their head as if waking from a dream, screaming with horror as they see your transformation. Worse, they could go running back to the office to explain that everyone has been bamboozled — the Office Ten is really an Out-of-Office Five (or Four or Two).
The bottom line: If you want to keep enjoying your Office Ten fantasy, don’t let it get real. You owe it to yourself, and to all the people who are crushing on you and hoping against hope that someday you will ask to share their box of paper clips.
Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at bob@bgplanning.com.
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