All morning long that quote from the movie Office Space kept replaying in my head, “Uh-oh. Sounds like somebody’s got a case of the Mondays.” I’m almost certain you’ve encountered a “case of the Mondays” regardless of the day of week. You sit down at your desk ready to conquer a plethora of projects only come to find out the data you’ve been working with seems to be a miss. You discover the error, realizing you’ve wasted valuable time. Luckily you can just re-run the data sequence and begin again, only problem is you can’t remember your password to log into the system and no one is answering at the IT Help Desk.
The rest of my day continued that way and by the time 2 o’clock rolled around I was in desperate need of a mental break. I grabbed my lunch and headed to the break room where the television was tuned to CNN. Since no one else was around I began flipping through the channels looking for something a bit more mindless. I soon came across “Everybody Loves Raymond,” a sitcom about a Long Island family that my college roommate and I used to watch. The episode had only just started and as I began to relax and enjoy my lunch in walked the CEO. She set her takeout box down on a table nearby and strolled right up to the TV and began pressing buttons. I thought for sure she was going to change the channel back to the depressing all news station. In that very short instant my whole opinion of her was about to change.
But to my great surprise she increased the volume as she turned to face me saying she was in need of a little entertainment. I quickly explained that we were on the exact same page, “a case of the Mondays” on it was Tuesday. We enjoyed the rest of the show together, mostly in silence except for the occasional comment and the sound of laughter. I felt comforted knowing that someone else at the office was having a tough day. The experience also reminded me that we are not just individual silos, but rather that we are all interconnected in some form or another.
