For some context, this past week I’ve been doing UOCD at my job. Specifically on employee sentiment surrounding my workplace. This job actually came about because I was running out of intern things to do, and I was feeling not as excited as I should be for my existing work.
- Interview everyone who works at the company.
- Synthesize individual feelings into larger overarching trends
- Come up with actionable suggestions for to positively impact the work environment
Anyway, the topic of “shooting the shit” came up during one of the interviews. This was the first time I’ve ever encountered the phrase. If you didn’t click on the urban dictionary link yet, you should.
I was pretty unsatisfied with most of my high school years. I was a really quiet teenager. The kind of kid that teachers would often say “can you please speak up, we can’t hear you,” the kind that dreaded any kind of group work because I was afraid that no one would want to work with me, the kind of kid that you probably pegged as “hates talking.”
Now I’m pretty sure that I didn’t hate talking, I was just really scared of talking. Ironically most of the unhappiness accumulated during those years came from the fact that I was so quiet. I would have probably enjoyed it more if I felt like I had more people to shoot the shit with.
So here I am again two years in the future with this uneasy feeling of being unhappy. I’ve thought about the reasons for why this was happening, like maybe I don’t actually like CADing, or maybe I don’t like sitting in front of a computer all day, or maybe I need to do more hands on things, but honestly everything would probably be better if I had people to shoot the shit with.
“Well then, why don’t you?” you ask. Well, what am I supposed to do when I feel that the work environment encourages people to put on headphones and isolate themselves? What I ended up doing was was writing up a proposal for a workplace review so I could interview everyone.
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