This article is part of San Francisco Confesses, a feature series dedicated to anonymous stories from locals they’d never share with their name attached.
I received the Slack message at 10 p.m., right before jumping into bed to watch an episode, or three, of The Office. I know I should snooze my notifications, but I never do — the anxiety that comes with a later barrage of messages at once is too much.
This message was from a salesperson at the startup where I work, a guy we can call Greg. Greg could be described as a kvetch; something is always irritating him, and he is not shy about letting me know. You see, as an office manager, it’s my job to grit my teeth, listen, fulfill every last request he — or any other employee — has while being grateful for the stock options and health insurance.
Greg’s requests are usually for the specific whey protein that he’d like in the office, but this one was different.
This message was a picture of a toilet clogged with shit.
You might be wondering how I responded to Greg. The answer is that I popped a Klonopin, started a free trial of Headspace, and made plans to deal with the situation in the morning.
While shocking in visuals and time of day, this was not an isolated incident — in fact, shit is a common motif in my story. I’m frequently torn from my desk—where I might be doing $250,000 in expense reports, planning office events I’ll be forced to attend, dealing with building management, or a wide variety of other tasks—to flush people’s poop for them.
To be clear, people don’t walk by my desk and say, “Hey, I just left a floater in the men’s room, would you mind taking care of that for me?” but they might as well. A helpful hint for people in the tech world (and beyond): Pressure-assisted toilets, the kind we environmentalist Silicon Valley types love, need some time for their tanks to fill up. So, if you’ve gone into the stall after someone has just left and it’s now not flushing, chances are the toilet is not broken, it’s just not ready for your massive Sweetgreen dump yet.
I’m frequently torn from my desk — where I might be doing $250,000 in expense reports, planning office events, or a wide variety of other tasks — to flush people’s poop for them.
Despite communicating this simple yet important detail, people still come to me to flush their poop for them. I should also mention that there are plungers in the stalls so if the need arises, individuals could plunge the toilet themselves, but would rather I do it for them, the way a child expects their parents to wipe their butt for them.
Being an office manager in Silicon Valley is a difficult and thankless job that’s lowered my self worth more than anything I can think of. But the larger takeaway is that the tech industry’s culture of providing abundant perks has cultivated a level of employee entitlement that I find shocking. It can be so extreme that it isn’t sustainable for facilities staff to cater to effectively.
The infantilization of tech workers that I witness on a day-to-day basis is alarming but inevitable when everything is taken care of for them: Meals and snacks are prepared to their requests, dishes they throw in the sink will magically disappear, and their free kombucha spilled all over the floor will be cleaned up by someone else. It’s this very environment that leads people to believe that it’s appropriate to send a picture of human shit via Slack at 10 p.m. to the office manager, effectively ruining the one thing that relaxes them: reruns of The Office.
I never intended to become an office manager, much like Pam Beasley. I don’t see it as my career, or at least I hope to God it isn’t. In a past life, I was an academic, a broke and jaded “intellectual” barely treading water in an American Studies doctoral program in the epicenter of coastal liberalism. After four years of sitting through seminars in which people snapped in agreement with one another and where prefixes like “post-post-” were common, I decided to pursue more creative endeavors. Of course, I needed a 9-to-5 to support this lavish lifestyle of sitting in front of my laptop writing painfully Sarah Vowell-esque essays. I applied for this job at a startup and somehow convinced them I was up to the challenge. And just like that, here I am.
At first, I enjoyed the job. I was nearing my late twenties, and I’d never made more than my $24,000 a year stipend, and I was now making significantly more to order snacks, accept packages, and leave at 5 p.m. sharp every day. My boss was cool, we liked the same music, and during our interview, he told me that this job was his day job until his band hit it big, so we were on the same page. But the honeymoon period only lasted a month or so, and soon I realized the job was not just ordering snacks and accepting packages, but also managing calendars, planning events, dealing with vendors, basically making sure anything anybody wanted was given to them, regardless of if they were capable of doing it themselves. I had become as jaded about the tech world as I had been about academia.
The tech industry’s culture of providing abundant perks has cultivated a level of employee entitlement that I find shocking.
The requests I receive daily and the way I’m expected to handle them creates an overall hostile work environment where I’m disrespected and made to feel less than on a regular basis. Over time, demand after demand, I’ve come to resent the employees in my office, which is a shame since many of them are perfectly nice people whom I’d have no problem with under normal circumstances. If you work at a startup, consider this a wake-up call in how you treat people in my position at your company. You might end up relieving them of their daily Ativan binge on their morning BART ride.
A quick list of some other things I’ve encountered:
Poop on a toilet seat, poop on the floor, and a legal pad lodged so deep within our plumbing system that city workers had to come fix the damage.
Doodles on freshly painted walls and on brand-new furniture.
Entire bowls of Cheerios, salads, and ramen dumped into the kitchen sink.
Cans of air freshener and deodorant floating in toilet bowls like mob hits in a Scorsese film.
Complaints that lemons, limes, and cucumbers are not cut properly for infused waters.
Complaints about the overabundance of donuts on… Donut Wednesday.
Complaints about the way the catering is arranged.
Nowhere is the entitlement in my office more evident than in the realm of office temperature. In my office, there is a Slack channel dedicated to the temperature where “team members” can engage in lively discourse about how cold or hot it is in their respective sections, with the expectation that no matter how they are feeling, I will rush to adjust according to their individual preferences. How do they go about asking me to adjust the temperature? Politely, you might think. But unless you consider nothing but a snowflake emoji or a flame emoji, or even nothing but the words “hot” or “cold” polite, you would be wrong. In other words, I am expected to drop everything at the sight of an emoji to adjust the office temperature any time any single individual feels slightly uncomfortable.
I keep the office between 71 and 73 degrees, yet on numerous occasions, I’ve seen one person post a snowflake and the person directly next to them post a flame. So, as it turns out, the folks in my office not only seem to have no respect for my time, they seem to have very little consideration for the preferences of the people around them.
Rather than coming to the reasonable conclusion that people have different resting body temperatures or personal preferences and taking responsibility for their own comfort in what could be described as perfect room temperature, people in my office assume I have nothing better to do than to leave my desk 15 times a day to adjust the thermostat to their individual needs. In an office of close to 300 people, catering to individual needs such as this is impossible, yet when I bravely approached the executives about my struggles, I was told to continue doing it. Apparently, it is more important for twentysomethings to feel babied than it is for them to put on the goddamn free hoodie I put on their desk the night before they arrive on their first day of work.
Now, instead of actually adjusting the thermostat, I simply walk to it, pretend to push some buttons, and go back to my seat.
The frigid temperature has resulted in some employees using space heaters—causing entire sections to suddenly lose power. It would seem that after many instances you might not want to continue using that space heater, especially when the thermostat in your area is reading 72 degrees. When I was finally able to get the employees to stop tripping the breakers, I was met with a demand to bring in an electrician to rewire the whole section. The electrician replaced all the breakers and told me to tell them to put a sweater on if they were cold, exactly what the HVAC technician had told me numerous times before.
Can you imagine? Non-tech people being confused and baffled by our employees’ demand for a utopian ambient temperature?
Lighting is another major source of drama. Ideally, we would all work and live in inviting, open spaces bathed in natural light. Unfortunately, we don’t all have the privilege of living and working in a Dwell magazine spread, and artificial light is a necessary evil. In my office, employees will stop at nothing to mitigate the effects of the evils of lightbulbs, and by that, I mean that they constantly demand different ones.
I’m a friendly doormat who resents that part of my job is to reinforce this industry’s culture of prioritizing the comfort and feelings of others over people in my type of position.
I acknowledge certain types of light do give people headaches, but I was raised to shut up and not inconvenience anyone with my own shit, so when I’m asked to replace lights for a third time after having already replaced them twice in one month, I’m no longer able to sympathize. Get blue light blocking glasses, take some Advil, and stop bothering me. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on bulbs, handymen, and have come in at 6 a.m. too many times.
I can’t fault my co-workers entirely for the way I feel. Part of the reason they have become so brazen in their requests and their behavior is because of how we interact. I’m overly friendly and overly accommodating. When faced with the daily passive-aggressive comments and inane requests, I try to summon the courage deep within me to set boundaries and set the precedent that while I’m happy to satisfy reasonable requests, my top priority is to ensure the day-to-day operations of the office — but I fail. In other words, I’m a friendly doormat who resents that part of my job is to reinforce this industry’s culture of prioritizing the comfort and feelings of others over people in my type of position.
The culture my company and Silicon Valley at large supports turns otherwise decent people into demanding individuals who believe their comfort and convenience is more important than anyone else’s. My hope is that, if you’re reading this and work in tech, you’ll better understand that office administration is an underappreciated yet integral part of the industry’s success. Or at the very least, feel empowered to flush your own poop.
