A few weeks ago a co-worker lost her husband, unexpectedly.  It was an odd and awkward situation. One day she was there and the next she wasn’t.  When I say awkward, I don’t mean that it was just something painful and something bad, which of course it was, or that we didn’t we didn’t know how to respond other than the non-committal and meaningless “sorry for your loss”.  I mean that there was nothing we could do to help her.  Even though I had worked with her indirectly for a couple of years and the woman she shared the office with had worked with her for over 20 years, we suddenly realized that we knew nothing about her personal life. We didn’t know where she lived.  We didn’t know her home telephone number.  We weren’t sure of her husband’s name.

This all led to looming sense of quilt.  I mean, how can someone you interact with on a daily basis be, for all intents and purposes, anonymous?  Part of this is social programming, certainly.  We are taught to respect each other’s privacy.  Another part of the equation, though, is the corporate culture.  Corporations discourage employee intimacy—as in friendship or familiarity, not groping behind the water cooler—for a number of reasons, the majority having to do with litigation and maintaining status quo.

We can’t discuss salary or medical history or the flaws of the system.  All those might agitate the work force or be used against the employee, and we can’t have that.  Although the corporate propaganda may emphasize the corporation’s goal that we all work together as a team, or even as a—insert corporate name here—family, the corporation would rather have us remain unacknowledged productive automatons available for exploitation for the benefit of the shareholders and corporate elite.  The employee’s personal life or welfare, other than how it may impact the bottom line, means nothing to the corporate structure.

Not even death can be allowed to disrupt productivity or skew profits.  So, our corporate culture is a community of strangers—associates rather than friends—neither allowed nor encouraged to be more.  When Thoreau said something about most men leading lives of quiet desperation, he could have been describing the corporate culture in which so many of us struggle, where the only true commonality is our common path to the grave.

As for my co-worker, she has returned to work, and the work seems to be part of the healing process.  She talks from time to time about what happened—how she heard him fall, how the coroner didn’t show up until four the next morning, and how the delay made several rooms in her house into a hazmat area.  But the details aren’t important now.

Now we watch and wait to see that she is alright.  On the job.  We still know very little about her, but that’s how it is in this community of strangers.

©Copyright 2018 by Kevin Fraleigh