Party politics

Ask not for whom the candles burn. Just eat the cake.

by Clea Simon

It's three o'clock, I've finally really gotten down to work, and suddenly my e-mail flashes me: it's time for cake! Forget the deadlines, it's office-party time again.

Now maybe this doesn't happen in every corporate environment in every city, but where I work, the office party is an institution. We celebrate births, marriages, promotions, departures . . . hell, we'll celebrate a bad Thursday if no other excuse for sweets and gossip presents itself. But even though we have cake and ice cream often enough so that I can no longer pretend food eaten in the line of duty has no calories, I still haven't gotten my mind around the core oxymoron of the office party. What are we celebrating here, and why?

Consider, if you will, the recent departure of a colleague of mine. She had announced, a few weeks before, that she'd gotten a better job, in a better office, and then told us that she'd given two weeks notice just as we went into the busy vacation-juggling season. Needless to say, none of us was acutely thrilled. And yet, on the day of her final appearance at a desk near us, there we were, bringing out the chocolate-covered whatever that we'd smuggled in with oh-so-many whispers a few hours before. And there I was, racking my brain over the big manila folder that we'd passed oh-so- surreptitiously from desk to desk in our time-honored tradition of hiding the card we would soon present.

It showed a smiling woman holding colorful balloons. I knew I couldn't simply black them out with my pen.

"Congratulations," I wrote. That was a no-brainer. "Best of luck in your new job."

The page still looked too white, but beyond those two lines, whatever I could inscribe would reveal a little too much of what I really thought.

"So glad you're leaving!" I was tempted to write, thinking of too many hours spent warding off inane questions and Ally McBeal updates.

Maybe she'd mistake it for irony. "Thank you for the excuse for more cake!" Now that would be honest, at least. I started reading what my colleagues had jotted down before me. "We'll miss you!" wrote one. "Keep in touch!" wrote another, and mentally I amended them to read: "We'll miss you during the summer crunch time," and "Let me know if they've gotten my résumé too."

If the truth must out, very few of us were joyful for her, in the way, say, that her leisure-time friends and her family must be. Sure, we all got a little thrill out of knowing that one of our own had made the big time. Yes, we were all somewhat relieved to be rid of our ambitious colleague. (This was a woman who not only dressed for success but made sure that we were all aware, at every moment, just what she was thinking and to whom she was loudly thinking it.) And certainly, we were thrilled at the prospect of more cake.

But basically, if we were celebrating at all, it was festivity by upper-office mandate, which could leach the joy out of even an entire subsidized carton of Ben & Jerry's.

It wasn't as if we could have taken a pass, been more honest and patted her on the back once each to wish her luck. This was a party that had to happen. Because once again, my colleagues and I (and our cake) had fallen into the gray zone between work and real life that causes more headaches than a sugar rush. We'd gotten caught in that pseudo-sweet middle ground of the "user friendlier" office, the enforced palsy-ness that's supposed to make work more congenial, but really just makes it harder to pack up at the end of the day and go home.

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Don't get me wrong. Some of my closest friendships have developed out of work relationships, and I have several colleagues who are, if not close friends, at least good enough company so that I like to meet them for a beer on the weekends or after work. But these are people I've chosen, who've chosen me, and work is simply where we met, even if our moaning and gripes constitute a large portion of our conversation.

It's the mandatory camaraderie of the newly sensitized office that I object to, the ruling that says if you share the news of your Pap smear with one colleague, then everyone this side of sales is entitled to hear, too.

Maybe I'm just a little prickly. Seven years ago, my boss forgot my birthday. Perhaps this wouldn't have been such a big deal if not for the fact that he and I had dated for a few months prior to the aforementioned big day, and basically I had no outside life. Therefore, when he and my colleagues failed to procure a cake after my late return from a willfully prolonged lunch, I was worried. When our usual coffee-break time came and went without so much as a furtively passed card, I was beginning to wonder, and when we all began to gather our coats and bags, I was furious. I buttonholed my boss and confronted him. He was a jerk. He was insensitive. He had committed the cardinal sins of not only unsatisfactorily resolving my love-life issues but also forgetting my birthday. Everyone else got at least a card. Didn't I matter? And he asked me, in response, why did I care that much about an office party? After the fuming, and many hushed follow-up conversations about inappropriate behavior, I have to say that I am not sure.

The problem then, of course, was that I had fallen into the trap of believing in the niceties of the office party, much as I had allowed myself the easy intimacy of the office romance. And when both proved to be so many empty calories, I felt somehow cheated. Now I've been there long enough to have a jaundiced eye for the cross-desk flirtations, the heartfelt avowals of lifelong friendship when desks are being cleaned out and the card is being passed. I don't expect office parties to be about fun. They're about appearance, the false front that allows us all to steam and sweat in close proximity most of our waking hours. But the cake is real enough, so please pass a slice.

Clea Simon is a freelance writer living in Cambridge.