Why so serious?

I recently started reading the web comic Questionable Content. One comic in particular got me thinking about business. The comic has the characters  at work at a coffee shop. And they’ve having fun. It’s completely unlike anyplace I’ve ever worked. Sure, it’s a little odd and you rarely see them do any actual work. But why is it unrealistic? Why can’t work be fun? Why do most places of business have to be so serious?

Now I know you can’t run a business successfully without taking it seriously. But there are levels of seriousness. Every place I’ve worked people treat it like a life or death situation. I worked at Cracker Barrel for six years through high school and college and the managers treated the job like it was the most important thing in the world. Everything must be done just so and you must say this exact thing to a customer (who are to be referred to as ‘guests’). My last job, my boss treated the job as a holy calling. Sure, we were working with children in the education field. It certainly was an important and worthwhile goal. But it isn’t life or death. It wasn’t necessary to devote every bit of yourself to it, to make it the center of your existence.

Any time you call into a business you always get these canned responses. I talked to one service rep from Comcast to get a question answered and she had to give me paragraphs of inane BS. The statements had nothing to do with my question and just wasted my and the reps time. It was so impersonal. So sterile. That’s what I don’t like about most businesses. You can do the job, and you can do it well, without taking it to seriously. But people do. People treat work like it’s something holy. You could call it greed and the quest for the almighty dollar, but I don’t even think that’s it.

That’s what ended up driving me away. It started to feel less like we were working towards achieving something and more like we were just working. Everything became so serious, so important. It went from a mission, a shared goal and turned into a business. A sterile, unfriendly place. A place with rigid rules, that were created for a reason but are now followed without thought. A place where no one really is sure what your purpose is, aside from continuing to exist.

This was kind of a rambling, incoherent post. Here’s the comic that got me thinking. Go out and put something silly on your head.