“Home Away From Home”

by Cheryl Kelly

(9-17)

They say the average person spends more time with the people they work with than with their own family members. The relationships we develop with coworkers influence our lives significantly. Sometimes that influence is beneficial and sometimes it isn’t. We all have those people we work with who we secretly condemn and consistently hope to see making the dreaded walk of shame with Human Resources carrying a beat up cardboard box filled with the contents of their desk or locker. In my case, having been at my place of employment over twenty years, there have been several of those. People who make it their life’s pursuit to make everyone around them miserable and their jobs twice as hard as they should be. I used to believe that I couldn’t harbor hatred for another human being, until…let’s just call him Mr. G, but I will leave that story for another article.

But then there are those coworkers who you meet along the way and your life changes, and for the better. Solid friendships are formed and there’s a comfort that is forged very similar to that which is found at home amongst family. A union bound around the commonality of the workplace that often times lingers long after one of you has moved on to other employment. And slowly that bond becomes irreplaceable. It becomes something you depend on to get you through the day and the many challenges that you face from 8 am to 5 pm, five days a week, or for some of us, from 6 am to 6 pm, six days a week. Much like family, coworkers fulfill a need, one that cannot be fulfilled by anyone else. They give us a sounding board and connection to common successes and griefs; a support group if you will. There is nothing better on a Friday night after work than getting together with coworkers for a bitch session over a couple of beers. I highly recommend it!

From family members, to neighbors; from lovers to coworkers, each person that you develop a relationship with satisfies some essential need that you have and plays an important role in your life to help in creating the whole ‘you’. I’m not of the persuasion that one person can be everything to you, no matter how awesome they are. Coworkers are a special breed of people in one’s life. They bring something very unique to the table. They offer a sense of family outside the home, a sense of community, and they offer solace that at times cannot be given by those closest to us. And they achieve this all in short bursts of time with a certain distance that keeps the relationship light and without some of the complications we all too often find in our other personal connections.

Human beings have a natural need to belong to something. That is why we constantly see new groups popping up here and there. Support groups, activity clubs, churches, and the explosion of the Internet with sites such as Facebook, give people the much-needed feeling of not being alone. Of being able to share similar thoughts and experiences. There is power in numbers and people feel less helpless when they hear someone say to them, “I understand”, or “I’ve been there”. Work is no different. It’s just another form of a group with participants that share common issues and goals and it does make you feel better to hear a coworker complain about something that irritates you or celebrate a milestone that you share.

For me, I have worked many places in my lifetime and at each place have forged many relationships with the people I worked with. To this day, I have people whom have moved away from the “coworker” title and straight into being called “friend”. Not every coworker will break into the friend zone but that doesn’t make them any less important or influential. The ability to understand frustrations that rear their ugly heads at work and the opportunity to commiserate with like-minded individuals is priceless. And even though they don’t reside under the same roof, they do affect your life on a daily basis. They may not be family, but they play that role in your home away from home called work.

Editor’s Note: My own relationship with C. K. began in exactly this fashion. She was a high school student who started working at the local ‘Kresse’s Bi-Rite’ supermarket where I had a job, in the middle 1980’s. Our friendship grew and endured, now over 30 years.