Professionally awkward

Broken monitors, helpful colleagues — and a poker face as a professional imperative.

Photo by Steve Harvey on Unsplash

I had to go into the office in London yesterday.

The idea of going in is to make sure I stay in touch and have personal interactions with my colleagues.

When I got to my desk, a guy down at the end of the row was dialling into a team call.

“Morning gang.”

“Morning,” the guy sitting across from me said to his screen, also dialled in to the same call. Both of them were in headphones, ten feet apart, staring at their screens.

I looked at my screen. It was still black. There was a problem.

My monitor wasn’t working. We have these fancy new laptops that are supposed to just plug straight into the monitors anywhere in the building. Mine wasn’t working and flashed a “no USB detected” error message when I plugged it into the USB port.

Which was unhelpful. Even I could detect a USB port.

I went to the tech bar and told them my monitor wasn’t working. They gave me a replacement USB cable, which I considered for awhile before telling them it won’t work because the cable…