[wiether]

> It's cake and a break from work.

Actually, it isn't.

Since it's happening during work and between coworkers it's work.

I'd rather do actual work instead of pretending to be glad that coworkers are celebrating my birthday. Actually they aren't. For them "it's cake and a break from work".

So they basically have fun at my expense.

That's exactly why I always take a day off on my birthday. To do what *I* want to do on *MY* birthday.

And the cake part : sure, if you like bad food, don't care about your health and don't have allergies, that's perfect. But that's not everybody's case. Having gone through a weight loss journey during my twenties, work was the only place where I felt pressure from other people to stop my efforts and join them in their trash food orgies.

So I completely understand where @caymanjim's comment is coming from.

I'm probably a miserable person, if you say so.

As a coworker, I'll go out of my way if you ask for help around work or personal issues. But I will never impose on yourself something that is not directly related to our jobs.

You like having a party for your birthday at work? Awesome! If bosses are okay with that, have fun with all the other coworkers that share this same feeling! But don't throw a party for anyone else without asking them their opinion about it first.

If you can't understand that different people have different expectations about basically everything, I can see why you are quick to qualify strangers as miserable.

[johnnyanmac]

>But I will never impose on yourself something that is not directly related to our jobs.

I see sentiments like this and understand why we lost the workplace as "the second place" in modern times. Part of it is corporate exhaustion, but others just walk into the ironwall by themselves.

It's half your waking life during biological peak of life. And very few people are working their dream jobs. People can help mitigate the lack of passion in the workplace. It's not my job to maximize the company productivity. I'm not getting any extra pay for working harder.

>If you can't understand that different people have different expectations about basically everything, I can see why you are quick to qualify strangers as miserable.

To be fair, this chain started with an experience and then a dismissive response about a different expectation and experience. It takes two...

[mulmen]

> It's not my job to maximize the company productivity.

It literally is.

[johnnyanmac]

I'm an IC, so no. I'm given a task or a module of tasks to investigate and solve them based on budget. I may give input, but rarely are the approaches I'm told to take after giving options nor approaches the most optimal nor quality route. Nowhere in the contract does it mention "maximize productivity", nor does it happen in practice.

Even if I was a manager, politics in the office would keep me from hiring the most optimal employee if I can't convince HR or whoever to cough up a bit more money to hire them. Nor would it let the manager relax the load on the most productive workers stuck in meetings so they can work. There's a lot more Theatre among the c class to make things look shiny to investors than there ever is among the workers.

So it's not literally nor figuratively my job. nor even my job de facto. It's not even the C class's job: the most productive is not necessarily the most profitable to begin with.