Laughing Your Way Through Office Fiascos

You may think having a home office will be a piece of cake and you won’t have to face the many fiascos that occur regularly in offices.

Not so! You are just as vulnerable, perhaps more so, because there’s no one to blame and no one to turn to for help in your snug little place of work.

If you have a sense of humor, you are already ahead of the game. If not, it’s time to cultivate one quickly, for you will need it. That’s not a possibility; that’s a certainty.

God blessed me with a great sense of humor, and I find I need it on a regular basis. It saves me the cost of tissues I would otherwise need to wipe away the tears. Because an office houses electronic devices, snafus are a given.

The more you can take things in stride and be able to laugh at them, the easier your life will become. No one is immune.

Office Fiascos

Consider your office chair breaking. Or, just as you are seriously getting into your writing, you upset the container of paper clips. You may have your clothing eaten by your paper shredder and your manuscript may be destroyed by a massive paper jam in your printer. Your computer may freeze at a crucial moment in your writing and you may lose everything you’ve labored on the past hour. Files have an evil way of falling to the ground in abandonment, which is an excellent reason to put name, title and page number on each page. I have experienced just about every conceivable snag throughout the years and not all were electronically oriented.

One of my all-time favorite stories, and one shared most often, I refer to as my “Closet Incident.” As a professional, I want my office to function in an orderly fashion. Because of a space crunch, I took the office closet doors off. My clothes remained, but I was able to use the bottom part for storage of supplies. My file cabinets flanked the front of the closet. To reach the bottom drawers, I used a stool to prevent undue bending. As I backed onto the stool with files in hand, I missed it and hit the sharp side of one of the file cabinets. The impact knocked me onto the seat and over I went, falling backward into the closet.

Coping

My legs went up in the air, files flew everywhere and the clothes that had parted when I went through them came back together, leaving me in near darkness. It was impossible to get up.

Although it was a serious situation, I got so tickled I started giggling. Finally, my husband heard my laughter and cries for help and got me out of there. Thankfully, he was home that day.

Being able to appreciate the ridiculous in the midst of difficulty is an important way to cope with problems and can provide fodder for future stories.

Laughing your way through the fiascos of the writing profession and office experiences is not only good for your work, but also an important tool in dealing with life.