17 Mildly Embarrassing Signs You’re The Office Mom
1. When it comes time to experiment with a new recipe — cookies, tarts, breads, pasta salads — you know who your guinea pigs are going to be: the entire office. Your culinary experiments basically subsidize everyone’s monthly food budgets.
2. Your cardigan game is simply untouchable. The second the AC gets a little bit nippy, a cardigan essentially materializes on your shoulders, and everything is okay again.
3. Group outings and activities are your thing. You’ve never met a trust fall you didn’t want to organize, nor a team happy hour/trivia night that you weren’t on top of three weeks in advance.
4. Coffee is a deeply important part of your life. Your local coffee shop knows you a little too well, and often expects you to be “lady with a lot of orders” because you genuinely enjoy bringing coffee in for your coworkers and seeing how it brightens their day.
5. People have generally stopped thinking about birthdays, because they know you’re going to come around a day or two in advance with a card to sign and 10 dollars to collect, and they don’t have to worry about it.
6. (Even though you occasionally complain about how all the planning/birthday-ing/team-building falls to you, you secretly love being able to organize it yourself.)
7. Your desk is a small treasure trove of essentials: ibuprofen, mints, pens, small snacks, and possibly a needle and thread if you have leveled up in your office mothering.
8. When someone wants to complain about something, they know they can always go to your desk and be listened to, no matter how dumb the complaint itself is. Your desk doubles as a therapy station when needed.
9. You look forward to the company Christmas party in a way that is probably not healthy, but you couldn’t care less. Everyone will be in the same room! Drunk! Hugging and telling each other how much they love working together! As it always should be!
10. You regularly check to see if your coworkers have eaten when you feel that they’re working too hard, and occasionally drop off fruit/nuts/general snacks when you think they need a boost of energy.
11. The fact that having pet names for coworkers is “not very professional” (eye roll), that’s never stopped you.
12. Sometimes it really feels like you are slowly transforming into a medicine cabinet, and someone will go to your apartment one day and find a pile of Band Aids, Aleve, and Tums where you once were. (Everyone in the office knows to ask you before they run to the pharmacy.)
13. Your emails are always at least two degrees nicer than everyone else’s, and you are not afraid of smileys and/or exclamation points (life is too short to end everything with an aggressive period).
14. Under your watch, the fridge is never not-stocked. Diet Coke and Starbucks Double Shots are your drug, and you are always a dealer in great supply.
15. Your post-it use can only be described as “masterful.”
16. The day someone brings a pet into the office is the day you will get no work done at all.
17. When people ask you why you do all this extra stuff at work, you are never good at conveying that you really do love it, and that for you, making a bunch of cookies to bring to the team picnic you organized is not work at all — it’s just what comes naturally.