Do you ever forget that your co-workers are actually people with lives outside of work?

4th of July barbecue meet-up with a couple of friends and I bumped into a colleague (okay.. actually my line manager)
Fast forward to today...I'm struggling to reconcile this put-together sober person with the one I saw yesterday. Tf.

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SomeMichGuy · M

LMAO I love this post. Some people are VERY careful about making sure that there is no overlap between work and personal; some places try to be very invasive of your personal life (e.g., the California Silicon Valley places which try to make it very easy to live most of your life there, at work...).

Do you think that this is because of a strict-ish sense of strata (supervisor vs. the supervised) and that there is a reticence around hierarchy which you absorb via the royalty/commoner aspect of being raised British...? I.e., does that fundamental thing in (high?) society affect all manner of relationships which one sees as essentially hierarchical and therefore some mirror/type of the royal/common split?

I have had both people I have gone out of my way to avoid, outside of work, and wonderful people, as supervisors.

Good question.

Reemar · 31-35, F

@SomeMichGuy I hadn't thought about it that way :) I cant speak for all British workplaces, but my colleagues (at the time I wrote this post) were much older... the generational gap tended to limit interactions outside of the work setting/ work-related issues.. even work-social events still qualify as work and people tend to treat them as such. It was refreshing getting to see the other side :)

SomeMichGuy · M

@Reemar Yes! Seeing people in a more informal setting really helps put things into perspective. 😊