“6 Underground” by Sneaker Pimps is like a chill pill… “Take me down, 6 underground. The ground beneath your feet. Laid out low, nothing to go. Nowhere a way to meet…”

Friendships in the workplace are taboo. There’s even been the invention of a word to refer to a “friend” in the workplace: “colleague.” Quite simply, your friends are the people you hang with voluntarily. Your colleagues are the people you work with, who you’re kind of forced to be friends with. It’s a universal truth that the majority of colleagues remain colleagues and only a few are promoted into your socialist circle to the more inspired role of “friend.” Personally, out of all the previous places I’ve worked at, I’ve promoted no more than 2 people who I consider good friends; one of whom is one of my best friends. The workplace carries with it similar dynamics to that from the classrooms of high school. With high school, you’re pushed into a vast melting pot of young people, a fraction only of whom you get along with or want to get along with. With the workplace, you’re pushed into a less vast melting pot of older people, a fraction only of whom you have to get along with or want to get along with. On a basic level, with both high school and the workplace, you’re just bridging a gap between the past and the greener pasture of the future. I’m not saying this is how it is for everyone. I’m saying that there’s a general formula that can be applied. Any place where you’re forced to share space with unlike-minded people is bound to yield more colleagues than friends. That’s why they say University is where you’ll meet and make friends that will stay with you for life. This rings true because University may be the first and only time you’ll meet like-minded folks who share your ambitions. In a lot of cases, they would certainly have similar career aspirations. The mechanism that makes this true is the relativity of human nature and familiarity is the thing that breeds comfort. The reason is simple. You’re more likely to get along with people who are similar to you, because you’re more likely to understand them better than anyone else.

On Tuesday I had what was possibly the longest conversation I’ve ever had with my manager when I dropped him off home en route. I find that conversation in the workplace only really revolves around work, but in the 15 minutes or so he remained in my car I must have found out more about him than I had done in the entire time I’d known him. I found out about his goals in life and where he wants to go with his career. He grew up beside the sea and his own life was further fuel for my hypothesis that there will be a certain point in a person’s life where they will want to relive times past. It seems to me that there will always come a time in your life (usually around middle age) when you’ll want to regress back to those childhood days of bliss. My manager was telling me how it certainly feels true because he was saying how he misses being a stone’s throw away from the sea. This is further compounded by the yearning of my friend D who grew up in the Bahamas before moving here. His plan now is to move away from the concrete jungles of London and find himself a spot in a beach environment. Not just any ordinary beach environment a couple of hour’s drive away but to a place far away that would require aircraft or Dorothy’s ruby shoes. In an appropriatly perfect world he would indeed travel there by tapping his magic shoes together and making the immortal incantation of “There’s no place like home” because he plans to make his rejuvenation in the land of Oz (Australia, by the way). A part of him just wanted to be by the sea again. This is something a city person would not fully understand till they experience the blue sea for the first time. Feeling young again is just as good a reason as any to displace yourself somewhere far away for sake of the past.

The thing I love about being able to drive to and from work is the CD player in my car, not to mention the pretty darn good sound system installed. I can sit back and turn the music up and within seconds it will be like I’m in my own little vibrating world. With the bass going off, I don’t only hear the music. I can feel the music. If I open the sunroof and wind the windows down, I can even share the music. This act of kindness (or noise pollution to some pensioners) makes me seem less silly to the people who see me bopping my head in the car. Everyone knows that only the mentally unhinged bop their head to the music of one hand clapping.

Dad recently found out the usefulness and power of e-mail. He used to think that you had to pay for sending e-mail, but I informed him that it’s free and the only cases that money changes hands would be for e-mail subscription or service provider fees. He was happily bashing away at my keyboard, sending e-mails in the past few days. I sure hope he didn’t read any of the junk mail in my inbox. I really don’t want to have to go through the motions of explaining why I’m getting follow-up e-mail for Viagra.