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Illustration by Drew Shannon
Not to put them on a pedestal above the others, but work friends are a special breed of friend. You spend the majority of your week together. You’re in the trenches. You have the same enemies. You know all the characters and personalities the other is dealing with. Oftentimes, they’re the one positive of your workday, people you can take brain breaks with, people that will talk you off the ledge at the moment when you’re thinking of risking it all to make a snarky comment to the boss.
Some work friendships may be born through an act of sacrifice. Picture this: it’s your first week working in a kitchen and you drop a raspberry pie face down on the floor. You make panicked eye contact with the head baker as one of the owners walks in. Your future work friend stands in a superhero pose in front of the pie blocking it from the owner’s view. The bond has begun. There were many metaphorical pies dropped after that, but alongside those messes is your friend who makes sure you don’t get in trouble for it, helps you clean it up, then laughs about it.
Some colleagues you click with right away and fall into a natural rhythm with, you spend three years phoning each other at the end of the workday, on the drive home, sending an unhinged amount of voice notes to, so much so that when you leave your job you think your phone provider may reach out and do a wellness check on you because the three to four outgoing calls daily to the same number have dropped off. These colleagues always lend an ear for a vent session, listening and validating, but will also call you out when you’re overreacting or being unreasonable. Something only really good friends do.
My guitar centres me and serves as an island of solace in dark times
Others work friendships may start off a bit rocky. When someone comes off a little intense (perhaps a little too similar to you?), you wonder, “Who do you think you are?” But you later learn you’re cut from the same cloth, the same breed of perfectionist and have an affinity for tea. Not much more is needed to seal the friendship after that.
Your work friends are also the first line of defence when you’re having a really bad day. Yes, you can run to the bathroom and call your partner in a panic. But when you’re catatonically shuffling through the hallway, willing every part of you not to break down and cry, they’ll jump in without question.
You may warn them you’re going to have a Britney in 2007 moment, and when you get to work (after sobbing in your car for 10 minutes) you’re greeted with a “Hey Britney!” and a walk around the office to distract you.
You’d think these relationships may be a product of circumstance, sure, but aren’t most? If my parents weren’t my parents, would I even know them? If I weren’t related to my sister, would we find each other in a different life and be just as close? I don’t like to think about this because I don’t know the answer, but the good news is that it’s this life, and those are what-ifs I don’t have to worry about.
It’s a sad truth that most work friendships fizzle out, especially when you no longer work together. It’s a symptom of losing one of the first things you had in common. But as we often hear, it’s about the journey, not the destination. If your time at a workplace were a bit lighter, more fun and some days a bit easier, because of these friends, it was worth it.
When I look back at my old jobs, there’s a lot I don’t remember. I can’t remember how we sent out newsletters at my first corporate job, the first time a customer yelled at me or anything that was a great cause for anxiety. But I remember the inside jokes and the camaraderie. Or the time I was away on a work trip with a colleague and she knew my anxiety was acting up and asked how she could help distract me, and she did. Or the time my friends dropped everything they were doing to help me and make me laugh (at a time when it felt like an impossible feat).
In the spirit of what-ifs, if I look back at all the best friends I’ve made through work, I think we’d all find each other in some other life, in some other workplace, still laughing and looking out for each other.
Rachael Neumayer lives in Hamilton, Ont.