7
Mutiny
Employees, bosses and rebels
When Declan, the office Buddhist, loses it at the photocopier.
When Tim from accounts can’t remember how to do long division.
When Samira won’t stop aggressively typing even when you’re talking to her, so you look over her shoulder, and all she’s writing is: ad;flkjals;dkjf easllwejjo iasfdk kneessasllee.
When Ben’s phone rings, and he is bunking off (again), and he asks you to cover by answering his phone and pretending to be him, so you do, and it is the results of his STD test.
When Lucy’s “emotional support hamster” bit her.
We drifted one by one into the meeting room on the fourth floor. The light was fading, and no one had yet switched on the overheads. The caterers had already arrived with the “informal lunch” on platters, sad-looking sandwiches and some sliced fruit. My friend Mark peeled off the cellophane, and started to help himself, and then we all joined in, a little giddy with the prospect of free food.
The view from the window took in most of the east of the city, and it was possible to see the newest tallest building going up, red lights festooning the cranes, purplish clouds drifting across. An airplane. There was small talk: Good Christmas? The heating was too high. We were waiting.
The vice-chancellor of our university was coming to “meet” us. “Informally.” For a whole half an hour, which, we had been told by our head of department (over email, but the smirk was definitely detectable), was an unprecedentedly long audience to be granted. Had anyone actually ever met our new boss? Screwed-up faces. Shrugs. The older ones stared at their iCals like it was all a monumental waste of their time. Some of the younger ones were keener, hair brushed, smart trousers, as if in that meeting an impression might be made and a glittering future in senior management secured. The rest, me included, were just suspicious for no other reason than that this was the person in charge and it was our moral duty to mistrust them.
The catering man returned, this time with a thermos of coffee and the posh biscuits. And at that same moment, the VC arrived, ushered in by our manager, who looked harried and servile. Mark turned toward me, raised one of his enormous spidery eyebrows and jogged his head. I looked, took a moment to register, and grinned. Our VC was trailing a bit of toilet paper from her shoe.
THE IDEAL WORKER
Some coworkers are our conspirators and allies: they know all the most important details of our lives—when our dentist appointment is, why we can’t buy a pair of shoes that fits, the punch lines of our best jokes. Others are our gossip buddies and box-set experts. Then there are the ones we say “hi” to in the lift. Some irritate, with the way they pick their ears or pile up mugs on their desk, or get inexplicably defensive every time you mention the strange smell coming out of the recycling bin near their desk.
But there is always one—at least one—who is our nemesis. The one who beat us to the promotion we wanted, whose easy wit makes the boss laugh, the one whose career we watch from the corner of our eye, comparing our own against it. Their successes leave us with an oily nervousness in the stomach, a sense that we must either fold or fight (and are we even up to the latter?). No wonder that, when these people meet some work-based catastrophe—misremembering the boss’s kid’s name, or being overheard joking about Lucy in HR’s mustache—we experience a secret clutch of satisfaction. Their stock has fallen. Ours might rise.
If you look at adverts on TV, you might believe that today’s workplaces are thriving ecosystems of trust and mutual respect. Employees (usually portrayed as knowledge workers—software engineers, designers, architects or, improbably, academics) are open and enthusiastic, happy and productive. They take things on, and get things done, all while having an open and agreeable relationship with their colleagues and bosses, who in turn value their individual contributions. Gone are the divide-and-rule tactics of sadistic managers, the humiliating hazing rituals, the never-ending subterranean games of one-upmanship. The modern workplace aspires to teams not tyrannies, civility not scorn, beanbags not bullies. In it, mistakes are simply “learning moments”: admit it; move on.
Truth told, in an office, Schadenfreude can sprout and multiply prolifically. Sometimes we are explicitly encouraged to feed it. You know those horrible clip-art pictures of corporate people in suits high-fiving that are supposed to inspire? Behind each celebratory smile is another company’s lost contract. Exhortations to “beat our competitors”? What else but an invitation to cheer when their profits plunge. Academics generally loathe the league tables of universities, which have become so much a feature of higher education in the UK today. But we still exchange little grins in the corridor at the news that our close competitor has slipped down the rankings—whether or not we’ve crawled up. When it comes to our team against another’s, their mistakes are a little chink of light through which we might scramble, a triumph not so much for us as individuals, but for our tribe (about which, more in the next chapter).
Most workplace Schadenfreude is, of course, far more covert, and arises from the suspicion that we might be nudged out of the way, or some attempt at one-upmanship is being launched. When a colleague’s radical new suggestion for holding meetings standing up is firmly knocked back, we inwardly smirk, happy to see her slapped down trying to outdo us. Or take that wholesome colleague who loudly encourages you to go outside for lunch, making you look bad (you don’t want to; you want to stay hunched over your computer looking at shoes). He gets caught in a freak downpour, and has to wear his PE kit to the board meeting—and you, with an enthusiasm not hitherto witnessed, arrive promptly at the meeting with an expectant look on your face, ready to hear him explain his “unconventional appearance” to the Chair.
Some workplaces deliberately set colleagues against each other, using winner-takes-all competitions for bonuses, or displaying everyone’s monthly targets in the hope that this will stir their employees into working harder and faster. In this environment, laughing at a colleague for missing their target can be friendly banter, a way of letting off steam, and acknowledging that the wheel of fortune keeps turning, and what’s mine today might be yours tomorrow. But even if in less overtly competitive environments there’s always that colleague, who was once on your level (you might even have had a slight edge) but who somehow (how?) knew to schmooze and flirt with the right people, to go to the right coffee shop and drink the same obscure coffee blend as your boss, who was always in the lift at the right moment, cracking the right kind of joke, who somehow managed to contrive to wear exactly the same brand of shoes as your boss had Literally Just Bought (you suspect foul play; secret camera in boss’s bedroom?). Eventually, he is given a prestigious account, and becomes unbearable: new bike, restaurant lunches, jogging. So when, some months later, we discover that he has made a monumental mess of it, we crane to overhear snatches of the angry conversation with the boss—door closed, blinds down. We see him slope away in disgrace. We cheerfully notice that he has become a quieter, more somber version of himself. This happy ending—part justice, part revenge—is our triumph and vindication, allowing us to congratulate ourselves on our own, slower (it’s true) but steady, ascent.
For many of us, however, work is a far more awkward blend of competitiveness and collegiality, our colleagues at once friends and threats. One moment we are exhorted to collaborate and share, the next we find ourselves being appraised and compared. It’s confusing, leaving us unsure whether to support and help our colleagues on their path to success, or stand back and secretly hope it doesn’t all work out too well since, when their stock falls, ours might rise. In our relationships with work colleagues, there is a faint echo of those sly childhood battles, fought covertly behind our parents’ backs, where we must appear to be behaving harmoniously with our siblings while actually engaging in the kind of masterly one-upmanship that would make Machiavelli blush.
We might experience a faint spasm of a reprieve when a colleague fails to win that prize, or feel vindicated when their End of Year Review was rather less glowing than everyone expected. We mask it as scrupulously as we can, but we notice it all right, and, perhaps later, feel a little shoddy and uncomfortable and wonder that it was there at all. Luckily, however, things are much more straightforward when it comes to celebrating the embarrassing gaffes of our bosses.
BAD BOSS MEETS STICKY END
When the boss tells everyone to smarten up their appearance—not realizing her jumper is on inside out.
When, on a company away-day to the seaside, the MD goes for a swim in the icy sea, implies that the rest of us are wimps for not joining in, and gets a cramp.
When a new chief executive ostentatiously removes his office door with a speech about “Communication, Communication, Communication.” And then Health and Safety makes him put the door back.
We laugh at their jokes and compliment their new hairdos, stand up straight and do our best listening faces when they tell us something important. We phrase our objections as “suggestions” and plaster a smile over our fury when it turns out that we’ve been scheduled for the Saturday-night shift yet again. Yes, we are the pathetic masses, the employees, and we love seeing our bosses trip up from time to time.
Robert I. Sutton is an organizational psychologist and Stanford professor, as well as the bestselling author of The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide. Bob is ebullient and generous and a great deal of fun. He is also probably one of the world’s most confided-in people on the subject of terrible bosses (or “assholes,” Bob’s preferred term). Every day, Bob will open his inbox and find three or four emails have arrived from complete strangers describing vain managers and vindictive supervisors, and CEOs who have let the deference and flattery go to their heads, and believe the rules no longer apply to them. Some are asshole bosses, throwing temper tantrums or chairs, abusing, threatening and demeaning. Others are more insidious, subtly putting us down with a slight sneer here, a moment of studied disinterest there. Bob’s favorite emails, however, are tales of comeuppance.
“One of the places Schadenfreude really comes through,” he chuckles, “is when you hear a story about how an asshole is brought down.” There was the high-profile airline company who sacked an asshole in IT: “She talked about how great they all felt after he left. And then he got a job in a rival company, which was viewed as a horrible place to work,” and that was even better. There was the radio producer whose boss kept stealing the food off her desk, so she eventually made some chocolates with a laxative and informed him after he’d eaten a handful. There was the CEO who was dismissed for racist bullying, her behavior then being splashed over the New York Times, disgracing her. Or the corporate lawyer’s secretary who accidentally spilled some ketchup on her boss’s trousers; he then hounded her to repay a £4 cleaning bill, even emailing to remind her while she was dealing with her mother’s death and funeral. Eventually, she shared his emails online, and he, humiliated, resigned. “The arc of a really good story of bringing down the asshole is you not only get rid of them, but they suffer in other ways too.”
Bob’s books, though generous about what a good workplace might look like, swill in this vast reservoir of Schadenfreude. Again and again, Bob enjoys reminding us how people with bad bosses tune out, using “creative avoidance” or sick days, or else resign, creating expensive staff turnover. And the lesson is deeply satisfying: asshole bosses harm their businesses, their legacy and their own careers.
Reading these tales appealed to my sense of justice or karma (even the ones that sound a bit like urban legends, like the laxative sweets on the desk). But more than that, they gave me a sense of camaraderie, the same sort of plucky feeling I get from reading tales of tricksters outwitting their oppressors. From the spider Anansi to the mischevious Huehuecóyotl of Aztec myths, to Jack of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” tricksters appear in many traditions. The resourceful Br’er Rabbit, for instance, cannily outwits the fox who has trapped him. “Please, Br’er Fox, don’t fling me in the brier-patch,” pleads the rabbit. Of course, the fox, eager to make the rabbit suffer, does precisely that—and the rabbit, quite at home amid thorns and brambles, makes his escape. Like trickster stories, “Bringing Down the Asshole” tales rouse us, make us feel nimble and bold. And this confidence is both the gift of Schadenfreude, and potentially its risk.
RESSENTIMENT
When your former boss, a bully who made your life miserable, applies for a job at your new company—and you get to email her to tell her she has not been selected for an interview.
When the janitor in your apartment block who reported you for smoking on the roof accidentally starts a fire in the basement with his cigarette end.
When your old teacher, who cruelly humiliated you in front of the whole class for not understanding fractions, is discovered to have faked his degree.
Among the darkest, most pessimistic works of Western philosophy is On the Genealogy of Morality written by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It makes disturbing reading today, not least because of Nietzsche’s unvarnished contempt—for women, the Jewish faith, black people and homosexuals in particular (Nietzsche, you may be unsurprised to read, was Hitler’s favorite philosopher). Yet if one idea from the Genealogy has lingered, it is the phenomenon Nietzsche called ressentiment, from the French word for “resentment” or “rancor,” and the role Schadenfreude plays in it.
When we are hurt or demeaned, our natural response is to fight back, says Nietzsche. But he believed that when people either by their nature or circumstances were unable to defend themselves—perhaps because of physical weakness, or fear of an immediate reprisal, or because they depend on the aggressor, as, for instance, with a boss or parent—the anger is repressed into a buried hostility. We sit and wait, perhaps believing ourselves to be virtuously forgiving and patient or loyal, but in fact becoming ever more embittered and venomous, nursing fruitless fantasies of retribution and poised to gain little moments of satisfaction where we can. “His soul squints,” writes Nietzsche of the person consumed with ressentiment, “his mind loves dark corners, secret paths and back-doors.” Schadenfreude is one such underhand strategy, a “revenge of the impotent,” delivering the sensation of retaliation with none of the risk.
In Nietzsche’s writing, Schadenfreude becomes connected to the weak and gutless, a cramped, meager feeling, inert and powerless. According to Nietzsche, it was women and other underdogs (Jews, black people, homosexuals) who were most prone, since they needed its empty consolations, and its ersatz feeling of power. This is the Schadenfreude of Bertie Wooster, whose benefactor, Aunt Agatha, is a constant menace in his life. She peers down her beaky nose, and chastises him for his feckless ways; he simpers, lies and agrees. So when Agatha accuses a hotel maid of stealing her pearls, and then the pearls are discovered in her bedroom drawer after all, well: “I don’t know when I’ve had a more juicy moment,” crows Bertie. “It was one of those occasions about which I shall prattle to my grandchildren… Aunt Agatha simply deflated before my eyes.”
Wooster’s satisfaction may feel good but it is ultimately unproductive. Nothing changes in his relationship with Agatha: he goes back to praying she won’t visit, and she goes back to lording it over him. It is merely a secret gloating by someone eternally under the thumb—the false sense of superiority captured so slyly by W. H. Auden’s evocation of “the Schadenfreude / Of cooks at keyholes.”
Was Nietzsche right to think of Schadenfreude as sterile and self-deluded? Might, in fact, the situation be even worse than he thought? Think of those haunted, gray-looking employees at Wernham Hogg Paper Manufacturing in the UK sitcom The Office. We meet them as the threat of redundancies looms, broken, depressed and frightened for their jobs. And no wonder, since their boss, David Brent, is incapable of fighting on their behalf. He lies to senior management, he boasts, he is lazy. He vainly thinks that his tasteless jokes motivate his employees (in reality his humor mostly nauseates them). But he’s the boss, and so his employees play along, and register their disdain instead in their secret pleasure at his humiliations, communicated through micro-smirks and minuscule eye rolls, with smothered grins behind his back and glances at the camera; they are victims whose triumphs are only in the mind. Though David’s failures will ultimately destroy them, his employees enjoy them nonetheless. These moments of one-upmanship give them a sense of superiority and control—and leave them exactly where they always were.
MIND TRICKS
Will we all suffer the same fate? Perhaps not. Bob Sutton knows all our secrets when it comes to getting payback at work. The way we steal Post-it Notes to compensate us for unpaid overtime, or come back a few minutes late from lunch—not enough so anyone would notice but enough to feel like a hero. None of these strategies will encourage an obnoxious boss to change their behavior, though they might let us feel like we run our own lives again, letting off a bit of steam and making it that little bit easier to open that spreadsheet or make that call to Bill in accounts. But could Schadenfreude ever lead to more meaningful workplace change?
If we’re lucky, Schadenfreude, even of the most secret kind, might leave traces; a boss, sensing that people are laughing at her, might adjust her behavior (or else become paranoid and vindictive, so this one is a risk). Overt smirking at a new and nervous boss does seem to work in the movies. In Nancy Meyers’s What Women Want, when their new boss Darcy (played by Helen Hunt) arrives, the macho members of the Chicago advertising firm inwardly scoff at her ideas, which simply makes her redouble her efforts and win over the team (though this may just be wishful Hollywood thinking).
Far more important is the fact that sniggering at the boss’s mistakes by the water cooler or in the loo is a powerful way for employees to bond. In fact, it is so effective it is a surprise that it’s not encouraged in team-building away days. And these moments of gossip might ultimately lead to some more productive conversations, such as how to gently re-educate your boss so he stops interrupting your lunch hour; or how to devise the perfectly timed revenge that makes the boss realize the error of their ways.
At the very least, Schadenfreude can provide what Bob calls a “mind trick” for surviving the daily indignities of work. Remember that dating study, in which seeing a love rival fail was thought to give students a little confidence boost—felt as Schadenfreude—which upped their own chances of success? Seeing your boss, however nice they are, accidentally locking themselves out of their office, or having a breakdown trying to unfold their brand-new, super-expensive folding bike, subtly rearranges the power balance. It might seem an inconsequential moment but, like that old sage advice to imagine your interview panel in their underwear, it might be just enough to give us the foolhardiness we need to push ourselves forward. I sheepishly tell Bob about the toilet paper on the shoe of my VC incident. That’s nothing, Bob laughs. “There’s a faculty member I work with who was always very horrible to me and was in a position to cause me some grief. Once I saw him give a speech—he’s a famous academic—and his zipper was down. I can’t even tell you how much joy I got from watching this guy speak with his fly unzipped. It still makes me so happy.” Bob is laughing merrily. “I try to feel guilty about it, but I can’t!”
It is ridiculous of course, but seeing those who lord it over us embarrassed, not just punished for smugness and power but exposed to be as feeble and error-prone as we feel, are tiny moments of glorious mutiny. Through them, we get a taste for recklessness and a feeling of sureness. And glimpse a world beginning to change.