Tag: professional relationships

I’ve told this story before, but it’s worth retelling.

I worked my way through college as an entry-level employee in a manufacturing plant. One day a full trailer overturned in the parking lot. As the low person on the totem pole, I got sent outside to unload, and re-stack literally hundreds of boxes. 

An hour later, the plant manager poked his head in the trailer. I figured he was there to remind me of the urgency of the task. Or to ask when I thought I would be done. Or to tell me how I could work smarter and harder. Instead he looked around, rubbed his hands together, and said, “What do you want me to do?”

And then we spent the next five hours unloading the truck.

It was weird at first. I was accustomed to hierarchy, and structure, and clearly defined roles. Plus, I had heard about bosses who were capable of physical labor, but I had never seen it firsthand.

But I slowly grew more comfortable, mostly because we didn’t talk much. He didn’t pretend to want to get to know me. He didn’t ask for input he wouldn’t actually consider, much less use. In fact, I only remember one thing he said. We had just struggled to clear an awkward tangle of boxes and pallets, only to find that the front half of the trailer looked even worse.

“Well,” he said, hands on hips. “This f-ing sucks.” And then we got back to work.

When I walked into the locker room at the end of the day, a co-worker yelled, “College boy. Spending quality time with the boss!” But it hadn’t been quality time. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t “special.”

Those hours were what Jerry Seinfeld calls “garbage time.”  As Seinfeld says about spending time with his kids:

I’m a believer in the ordinary and the mundane. These guys that talk about “quality time” — I always find that a little sad when they say, “We have quality time.”

I don’t want quality time. I want the garbage time. That’s what I like. You just see them in their room reading a comic book and you get to kind of watch that for a minute, or a bowl of Cheerios at 11 o’clock at night when they’re not even supposed to be up. The garbage, that’s what I love.

Because that’s when real life happens.

Garbage time is when a moment is not planned and optimized to within an inch of its life. When a conversation is not fraught with meaning and purpose. When an interaction or event is not filled with expectation — and accompanied by the resulting pressure to live up to those expectations.

Over the next few years, the same plant manager held regular all-hands meetings. Lots of planning and preparation went into them. The goal was for them to be impactful. Foster a sense of meaning and purpose. Be special.

Those plant-wide meetings were “quality time.”

But were a waste of time.

We never worked harder afterwards. Or smarter. Or more as a team. All the charts and graphs and management-speak were more off-putting than inspiring; the build-up was so great, the actual never lived up to the expectation.

But I did walk out of that trailer wanting to work a little harder. Wanting to work a little smarter. Wanting to help the plant manager achieve the goals he set. (And willing to help him out, a couple decades later, when our roles were somewhat reversed and he needed a job.)

Not because of anything he said.

But because we had spent garbage time together. 

Garbage time is the best time. With co-workers. With employees. With friends and family, and especially your kids. Garbage time isn’t weighted by the expectation that a moment will be special and memorable and perfect. Garbage time just is.

Garbage time is when you learn a little more about who people are. When people learn a little more about you are.

When relationships are not forced, but naturally formed. ​

Professionally, and personally.