On Work Friends

It isn’t fair to compare them to best friends. Best friends are the crème de la crème. For some reason, that person was born at the same time and somehow ended up living a bike-ride from your house and you went through every goddamn trial and tribulation of pre-pubescent life together and somehow you both survived. That gives them the gold jacket. They’re in the friend Hall of Fame. Untouchable.

Good friends, you ask? Good friends may have potentially been on the best friend track at some point in time. Or, you may have picked them up along the way. Undergrad, law school. Good friends you’ll vouch for — but you hold no legal or insurance liability for their actions at weddings or on golf trips. That said, you’ll do anything — within reason — for a good friend. Come on. It’s your good friend. It’s not like it’s some…

Acquaintance. Just some dude you know. But, you know what? Don’t shit on acquaintances. Walk into a room without knowing a single soul except …who’s that guy….I played in his foursome at that outing….we talked about the Grateful Dead on 13…what’s that guys’s name? Boom. Fist bump. Hey, man… And you both tread conversational waves on a superficial level. They know the deal. I dig a good acquaintance.

But, I’m here to talk about the work friends. Those motherfuckers you just knew you were going to vibe with when HR awkwardly paraded them around on their first day. Your tribe. The people you talk trash with. The people you can either love or hate working with depending on the project and your general level of disgust for work at that specific point in time. The weirdos that share your energy.

Standing in doorways or piled into someone’s office killing a random Thursday afternoon you kinda overshare a bunch of shit about your life because fuck it — these are your work friends — when are you ever going to run into them in real life?

And then you do. Worlds collide. And for a quarter of the night everyone is a slightly odd version of the person you know at work. Then after a couple drinks and some activity the room settles in and everyone becomes normal again. This is riiiight about that time of the night.