“Keeping Busy?”

Managers need to simply do better.

One of my friends from college was engaged to this guy for a while; at some point they split it off, and best I can tell from afar, he now has kids with some other woman and I think she moved to Chicago and works with the NFL on consulting projects. Life is a crazy carnival, am I right?

My friend’s then-fiancee was working for some insurance company or consulting company (I barely had a clue) and whenever there would be a happy hour in NYC back in ’10 or so, he’d show up at 7pm and say, “I had meetings all day. I didn’t start work until 4:30pm.” (That’s kinda the essence of white-collar work in many respects.) I actually learned a lot about standard white-collar bullshit from this guy, and then one time in New Orleans we had a conversation about mixology and Asian pornography, and I learned, well, I learned something in that conversation too.

Anyway, one thing this guy always told me was that whenever he did a 1-on-1 with his boss, his boss would come in, harried, and say:

“Keeping busy?”

About 5–6 years later, I had a boss who did the exact same thing. And since then (2016), I’ve mostly been freelance, and tons of managers I’ve worked with have hopped on calls and said “So, keeping busy?”