Must-Read: Being the Office Fixer

I haven’t worked in an office environment for about three years now. (For those of you who envy me right now, don’t.

It could all go wrong, so fast

Working in an office isn’t really that bad!) So I miss a lot of the fun daily things that would happen in the cubicle environment. Like playing pranks on my friend’s work station by changing his desktop icons to nothing but Bea Arthur. Or timing my trip to the break room at the exact same time that the cute girl was heading there. Or, you know, actually talking to another human being! (Like I said, the freelance lifestyle has its downsides.) But one thing I certainly don’t miss is when some situation gets fucked up insanely and people start running around like chickens with their heads cut off, and no one taking charge and telling them what to do.

Enter Men’s Health. Today they have a pretty expansive article for how to be “the fixer” in your office. How to be the man when it comes to calming everyone down, fixing the problem, and getting back to the important things in the office, like that game of chess you had with your cubicle mate.

Here’s the first step:

1. Stop the panic

Nobody functions in a crisis if everyone is running around screaming. Of course, that’s how most people react in a crisis. But you’re not most people. You’re Batman. So you don’t go around shrieking like a little girl. You also don’t act like executives often do when they’re in a pressure situation, and start pointing fingers. I had a boss like that once. Every time something went haywire he’d turn to whoever was nearest to him, peer at that person darkly, and say, “If this gets bad, it’s your ass.” That doesn’t help. In the end, things did go bad in our department, and guess whose ass was kicked down the stairs? Hint: It wasn’t mine.

In the current crisis, I took the simplest path.

“Larry!” I screamed into the phone. “Calm the hell down!” That did the trick. “Now,” I continued, into the heavy-breathing silence, “what’s going on?” In so doing, I was progressing to . . .

Head over to Men’s Health to read the rest.