...The Great Divide

By Ms. Dirty Laundry

When I started working at my current job, I was immediately struck with the immense divide between ‘management’ and ‘everybody else’. I was hired on in a management position but I never expected to be on one side of the huge political battle that quietly existed in my office.

Especially since this was my first real job and I had never been in a management position before.

A little background about the company that I work for. It is small. Not like ‘out of your garage’ small but less than 20 employees. It was even smaller when I started. All in all, we are young company, in every sense of the word. The company has been around for less than a decade. We work with many businesses that are relatively new themselves and our employee pool is young. And by young I mean everyone that works at the company is younger than 50, most by a decade or two. This is one of the reasons I was so surprised by the great divide. I guess I just assumed that because we were closer in age, closer in experience, closer in attitude, that this huge divide wouldn’t exist just because we had taken different paths in our career choices…Boy was I wrong!

In the first month, my boss tried to organize a happy hour to get everyone together in a more social setting. Plus we all liked to drink so what better way to get your employees happy it to let them off work a little early and buy them alcohol! I thought it was a grand idea. We thought everyone else did too…until that night when the only people that showed up were people who were considered managers. Umm, did they all forgot to leave work early and take up the boss on free liquor? Nope, they just didn’t want to hang out with us.

About a month later, I passed by the break room and overheard ‘everybody else’ talking about going to happy hour. I just assumed I hadn’t been asked because I was relatively new and they had all been working together for years. I didn’t say anything because, really, there was nothing to say. The next day I was hanging around talking to my boss and she asked me if I got invited to the happy hour the night before. Apparently at some point she had heard them talking as well. And hadn’t been invited either. And neither had any of the other ‘managers’.

I find it interesting that just because certain people, that might otherwise get along with someone else, segregate themselves based on the fact that those other people have a job title that contains “Manager.”