You have synchronized hangovers and you spend ALL your time together. These are just a couple of the reasons that colleagues are often a work bestie!
We all get by with a little help from our friends, and sometimes if we’re lucky, those friends can be counted amongst those with whom we work. They keep you laughing and protect you from backstabbing at work.
Adulting can be hard, especially when donning our grown-up business hats, so Liz Rae’s Elite Daily article, Work BFF: 10 Ways Your Coworkers Are Pretty Much Your Best Friends, helped inspire us to pen this ode to our very own Intelivate work biffles.
Sonnet 9-5
Oh coworker. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. …
(No, but seriously. Please allow me to innumerate the ways I adore you because I legit L.Y.L.A.S.)
1. You spend nearly ALL of your waking hours with your work bestie.
It’s inevitable that with close physical proximity, there will likely come some serious emotional proximity.
If you do the math – which generally, I try to abstain from all things ‘math’ (See also: That’s why I’m a writer) – you spend at least 40 hours with them.
That’s more hours of best friending than total Netflix hours of Orange is the New Black. (Side note: Suck it, math.)
2. You know their routine as well as you know your own.
You know when they need their coffee. You know how many cups they need and how they take it. You also likely know – sorry, coworkers – when aforementioned coffee takes effect.
You know when they’ll get hungry for lunch, and when they’ll cross over into the darkness of hanger.
And if you both share double-x chromosomes, you may also begin to share a routine.
Because, you know, pheromones.
3. You know all the secrets.
Not only do you have a communal water cooler around which you exchange office gossip, but your proximity has also lent itself to the sharing of your personal secrets. You both get that the corporate environment has high school cliques.
Tinder trysts, drunk dalliances, heartaches, and triumphs are par for the course.
And when your work bestie shows up hungover, you know immediately, especially since you were likely an accomplice.
4. You put the ‘happy’ in each other’s Happy Hour. (See also: Above sentence)
Because eight long, grueling, time-MUST-be-standing-still hours together is never enough, you’re also each other’s +1 at Happy Hour.
You’ve both got steam to blow off, and since the steam – or at least most of it– originated at the same place, it should stand to reason that it should be blown off in tandem.
And BONUS: There’s solidarity in synchronized hangovers.
5. You commiserate about work because no one else gets it.
Work is a chapter of your life that very few people in your real life understand because its nuances are lost if you’re not there to experience it.
No one but your work BFF will get your inside joke about the receptionist’s teeth-sucking tick or the obscure quote that can punctuate any story.
So when you need to vent about the boss breathing down your neck, your work BFF’s got your back.
6. They become ‘family,’ because, well, 40 hours doesn’t leave time for much else.
You laugh and cry.
You both help each other survive and realize there’s even life after rejection.
You argue and tease.
You donkey kick the copy machine and imitate Carl From Accounting’s mouth breathing.
In the absence of your real family – because again, you spend most of your waking hours in a 5’ x 5’ cubicle – you develop a family dynamic, complete with love, dysfunction and an ‘uncle’ that gets too handsy at Happy Hour.
7. They support you unconditionally.
Being in the trenches together can quickly forge a battle bond between you, allowing your BFF to love and support you unconditionally, even when frankly, you may not deserve it after your drunk shenanigans last night.
But much like family, they’ll accept you warts-and-all, even if you accidentally sexted her office crush last night.
From her phone.
8. You have shared interests, even if you didn’t always.
All that shared time and space has slowly made it hard to see where s/he ends, and you begin.
All that’s left to make your merger complete is to light a unity candle, extinguishing the flames of your separate selves.
As you unwittingly show up in identical outfits, colleagues begin to confuse your names and resort to referring to you by your hybrid celebrity couple name.
9. They entertain (read: distract) you all day.
Whether it’s an important, insightful, life-altering Buzzfeed or leadership style quiz or the latest celebrity gossip (Et tu, Gwen, and Gavin?), your work BFF knows all the right ways to keep you entertained, distracted and at your most baseline level of productivity.
But only sometimes. Fine. Maybe most of the time.
Goals and diets always start ‘tomorrow.’
Amiright?
10. They help you time travel at work.
Work can ooze by some days. On those days, you’d swear the clock is broken. It has to be. IT. HAS. TO. BE.
But thankfully – mercifully – a work BFF can help ease the pain of the infinite work days. There are days when all of you have to look forward to as you melt yourself out of bed in the morning.
A quick joke, inappropriate anecdote, dance or freestyle rap can take the edge off of just about anything.
And if s/he knows how to fix a broken clock, even better.
Because with that kind of wind beneath your wings, you can soar to unimaginable new heights at work, and if you’re really lucky, wonderfully impossible new lows after (read: sometimes during) work.
We would love to hear your personal experience with your work bestie and workplace biffles! Be sure to subscribe above to get our best business and career insights delivered directly to you.
Keep Reading: A Survival Guide to Dealing with Lazy Coworkers →
