No More Office Birthdays
5 minute read
A big personality tweeted amusingly recently about our English neighbours and their strange practice of making employees buy their own birthday cakes, complete with candles to share with their colleagues. This is such a joyless and embarrassing situation, that it makes me think that Ricky Gervais must have had an endless well of material to draw from when writing ‘The Office’.
The comments below the tweet were incredulous. How ridiculous! Here in Ireland, we love to celebrate our co-workers and mates. Surely there is *someone* who will produce a cake as an additional part of their job. Well, there is I suppose. As a woman with so-called ‘soft skills’, I’ve been the unofficial cake buyer in more than one office in Ireland, where the birthday boy or girl would never be expected to buy their own cake but an over-worked woman in a support role might be expected to use their lunch break twice a week to purchase one for them. I’ve found myself in a Vegan bakery to pay out of pocket for a €40 cake, when the office whip around had produced a princely sum of €16.45. On another memorable occasion, I ran to three different Marks and Spencer’s because the birthday boy wanted a Caterpillar cake, something of great popularity with six-year-olds, and only available in Marks.
All this is to say that in my years working in the Irish office, I have never seen a man organise a birthday cake. But as an ‘older’ woman (I was the grand old age of 34 at the time of the Vegan bakery fiasco), I was treated as a sort of maternal figure. Something that is both ageist and sexist but to rail against the cake made me feel like a birthday grinch, so instead, I internalised the embarrassment every time I had to count the coins that were often thrown towards me with a sigh or an eye roll, to buy another cake.
While I am personally reaching the end of my cake-buying tether, what is now being termed the ‘shecession’ (a recession that disproportionally affects women), is thriving. The figures are stark: 11 million women in the US have fallen out of the workforce in the past year. Others have stayed in at enormous cost to their well-being, juggling caretaking responsibilities for children or ageing parents, sharing space with partners, and taking on the lion’s share of the domestic chores.
The double-header of both ageism and sexism is a daunting proposition for women in middle-age looking to change their career or return to the workforce, but in my own circle of friends, I have no less than four inspiring women friends who have used this time to reset and realign work with who they are now and who they want to be in these new years.
My friend Ruth had been in the same industry for too long and found herself soul searching when furloughed during a lockdown. Over a dreamy roast dinner a few Sundays ago, while her two children were arriving in from hockey matches, Ruth announced that she had not only trained online for six months to become a special needs assistant but has now found a rewarding job in a special school, one that deals with kids who have behavioural issues. This pivot did not come easily for Ruth. She had spent years building a successful career in advertising but had become overwhelmed and anxious to the point of having anxiety attacks in work. Being expected to work late and meet clients’ unrealistic expectations had taken its toll on her both physically and mentally but she felt trapped within the same industry. Ironically Covid ended up being the best thing that happened to Ruth’s career.
She was forced to stop and let her mind catch up. She used the time to swim, meet friends and drink coffee. She stopped feeling guilty about ‘doing nothing’ and started to think about what she wanted to be doing in twenty years’ time. Ruth has been in her new role for four months now and says each days brings something new. She is learning from both staff and children alike. She can honestly say she would fight tooth and nail for the children in her care. She is invested and committed.
Ruth had thought that at 44 she was too old to change her career path, she can see now that she had a vast, transferable knowledge the whole time.
My friend Melanie was 26 when she qualified as a lawyer in England and during the final six months of training, she started to realise the profession might not be for her. Nevertheless, she took a role in what she considered to be her dream firm upon qualifying and poured all her energy into it. Turning thirty and struggling to conceive forced her to take stock of what she calls an ‘all or nothing’ approach to her career. She knew that whatever she decided to turn herself towards, she would need to start pretty much from scratch. She moved to Ireland with her partner, expecting her first child after years of trying and says this was an enormous catalyst for her. Melanie made the decision to stay at home with her son as much as possible while also going back to college to study psychology and psychotherapy. She found the change of subject completely captivating at first and fully absorbed herself in it. In her second year, she realised she needed to pace herself. She realised it wasn’t realistic to expect herself to be able to work in the same way as her younger 20-something peers who did not have the same family/ domestic commitments as her.
She is now a fully qualified psychotherapist, self-employed, and able to dictate her own hours. She finds the work endlessly fascinating and is drawn to the constant learning and reflection of her own self that is required by it. Melanie credits the persistence and fight she had to develop in her legal training with helping her to sit comfortably in a room with challenging emotions and conflict. She is proud of herself for creating this for herself as she enters her 40s.
As for me? Well, I’ll be enforcing some boundaries and won’t be buying any more birthday cakes. There’s a good chance that Covid has put the kibosh on the practice of sharing cake and blowing out candles in the office forevermore, and I think good riddance.
Emer O’Connor Roche, January 2022
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