My workplace is pretty unsexy. The glass-doored offices and the gray decor and buttoned-up coworkers just don’t do it for me.
Most offices are downright sterile, aren’t they? Yet workers around the world apparently manage to get something on amid their furry walled cubicles. Excuse me, but I find this totally ew. (Unless it happens on TV, like on Ugly Betty, when this guy from accounting develops a crush on our heroine. Then I find it utterly adorable.)
Anyway, I am so alone in my disinterest in workplace romance, according to a recent study by staffing company Randstad USA. Some “key findings”:
• 37% of working adults have flirted with a colleague;
• 8% currently have a secret crush at work;
• 17% of working adults have secretly dated someone from work;
• 45% of working adults residing in the Western U.S. said they have flirted with a colleague;
• two-thirds (66%) of working adults enjoy socializing with co-workers outside of the workplace;
• Midwesterners are more than twice as likely to say they have played matchmaker to a co-worker.
Apparently, the American West is a hotbed for office shenanigans:
• 45% of working adults residing in the Western U.S. said they have flirted with a colleague, compared with respondents in the Midwest (32%), Northeast (34%) and South (37%).
• Nationwide, 41% of working men admitted that they have flirted with a co-worker, compared to 32% of women.
• Men are also twice as likely as women to be set up on a date by a colleague (12% of men indicated a colleague has played matchmaker for them) and three times as likely to have a secret crush at work (12% of men, compared to 4% of women).
To some, the workplace is like a 9-to-5 singles party, with meetings:
• Two-thirds (66%) of working adults enjoy socializing with co-workers outside of the workplace.
• Those in the South (41%) and Midwest (35%) like socializing with co-workers at company parties and Northeasterners favor dinner (37%) or happy hour (28%).
But in social life as in work life, it’s the women who want commitment:
• Of the women surveyed, 53% have had an “office spouse” or someone at work with whom they confide about personal matters and relationship issues, compared to 42% of men.
Why can’t you just be my office buddy? Why is everything about sex in this country? Why can’t we all just get along–as colleagues?
