agonyaunt | (no subject)

Dear Miss Manners: What is the protocol in responding to a “joke” that is repeated ad nauseam?

I have a co-worker who says, each and every time she returns from the office restroom, “Gee, I forgot my coat and gloves!” or “I forgot to bring my parka!” or some other inane comment referencing the temperature of the bathroom.
Yes, it is cold in our office bathroom. I don't think my co-workers and I should have to politely smile/laugh/agree with her every single day, multiple times per day. The obvious solution is to ignore her, which I do.

My co-workers are much more genteel than I am, and they smile/chuckle/nod in agreement, then roll their eyes and complain when she isn't around.

Perhaps there is some clever thing to say to put an end to it?

Treating a joke as if it were meant seriously is the best way to defuse it. In this case, Miss Manners suggests, “Oh no! We thought we asked management to fix that. If you need to borrow a blanket, though, I think I have one in my car.”

Eventually your would-be comedian will get tired of explaining the “humor” to you — and find another target.

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I don't know, it seems to me that the best way to end this little joke is to get a space heater for the bathroom. Management ought to pay for that, but if they won't, I would willingly put some money into a hat for a $60 space heater to stop the cold and the complaining.

(And while this is too much to do for an office bathroom, we got a bidet seat for the toilet with a heated seat and omg I wish we'd done that years ago.)

My workspace has a very strict policy about bringing in your own space heaters; it's a fire risk. Instead we wheedled some official maintenance-department ones out of the friendliest maintenance guy a couple winters ago when the heat was officially broken, and "forgot" to return them when it was fixed. But even then we can't safely keep them running with nobody in the room, which would reduce the usefulness in a large shared bathroom.

Mm. Maybe they could keep the door open except when it's in use, then? If it's a single toilet bathroom. If it's a stalled bathroom they could keep it open nearly all the time.

Yeah, there's likely some kind of workarounds, but also, the best solution is everybody banding together to make it impossible for management to ignore (this seems unlikely to happen here though.)

Although honestly, I would be tempted to just start reminding coworker to bring her parka before she goes, and acquire one cheap to loan if needed. It would solve the joke problem with a taste of her own medicine while acknowledging the discomfort that's inspiring it, and also keep her warm in the bathroom. (For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, we have a small collection of unclaimed real fur coats at my workplace, and yes, they do get worn and loaned out as a visible protest some days.)

...I actually do want to know what those reasons are, though.

Oh, we have a coat drive every fall/winter, and we were given a HUGE collection of high-end coats last September that included a lot of vintage furs, and nobody who gives out coats actually seems to want th

Hm.

Well, you seem to have a use for them, but if you need another one then I think you can try asking an animal rescue organization or wildlife rehabilitation? They use the fur for some purpose, don't they?

Yeah this was supposed to be the end of that comment, sorry, premature post!

... seems to want the vintage furs. We even tried the people who run formalwear giveaways for the high school dances, and no bites.

Apparently some wildlife shelters will take them for species-appropriate bedding for orphans. And there's an occasional clothing giveaway/swap for trans women in one of the nearby cities, I've considered asking them in case there are some drag queens who need to increase their fab. But they all have odd hours and aren't easy to get to, so the coats are still just sitting on the coatrack mostly.

A theater group might be able to use them?

I asked a couple coworkers who do community theater and they said they'd check and I didn't hear back, so presumably they aren't chomping at the bit for them. I was considering asking the local high school's drama department, but last I heard they were very limited on costume storage unfortunately.

There is this thing people do where we kind of forget we had the same thought pattern previously. To semi-diagram:

Day 24: A walks into bathroom, goes "brrrr", leaves bathroom, jokes about temperature.

Day 35: A walks into bathroom, goes "brrr", leaves bathroom, jokes about temperature.

It may be the strength of the inciting experience making us not remember the last times we went through this loop. I'm not sure.

I'm not sure there's a thing one can say that overcomes this tendency, unless it is a (usually distressingly) memorable comment.

This is particularly true if the inciting situation is a monotonous one. (Dear Fraternal Unit: maybe I wouldn’t keep infodumping the same bits of music trivia if your radio stations of choice varied a bit from the same damn 70’s and 80’s arena-rock standards.)

I kind of wonder whether or not LW is at BEC status with this co-worker! It sounds innocuous but monotonous, and also like this co-worker thinks she is complaining to the only people who care about the situation. Which means that either no one has complained up the chain, or that any complaints to someone who could do something about it have gone un-answered.

I wondered about that, too. Is this really about the "wow the bathroom is freezing!" jokes or something else? Writing to Miss Manners about a coworker who repeatedly makes the same (non-offensive, kind of dad joke-y) joke seems like a lot? (Honestly, from the first line of the letter, I thought the "joke" was going to be something offensive, cruel, or at least off-color.)

I also wonder how much the others are actually "complaining" about the jokes, unless she's making a massive disruptive production every time. This really does sound like a BEC situation (by which I mean, LW is BEC about coworker and coworker is BEC about the broken climate control.) If there's widespread agreement in the office that the bathroom is too cold, this may not even be so much a "repeated joke" as "what I am saying instead of cussing out management".

(Source: I work in a building where people do have to keep blankets, scarves and gloves on hand if they have to work in certain rooms in the summer.)