What She Said

I started watching The Office at the suggestion of a girlfriend I lived with. She’d been gifted the first two seasons on DVD, and I don’t remember ever watching the show with her, but rather over lunch breaks, when I’d come home for forty-five minutes or so most days. I hopscotched through episodes, cherry-picking ones with interesting titles or descriptions, getting a general sense of the over-arching narrative.

Though I’d technically been working an office job those days, it was after I’d moved to Baltimore to start a more proper office job—more like Dunder Mifflin, complete with a birthday party planning committee—that I found more fellow fans and watched the show weekly. There was a cosmic synchronicity there, because though I’d found the show funny up to that point, something about actually putting on a tie each day and commuting for a job, and the office politics and rivalries and camaraderie and shared experiences all rang true.

That relationship that had introduced me to The Office came to an end weeks before season four premiered. I watched that premiere at a woman’s apartment, such that the memory of our second date is forever intertwined with “Fun Run” in my mind--making the date funnier, more charming in my recollection than I suspect it really was.

Back to cosmic synchronicity, the rest of the show’s broadcast run matches my time at that office job pretty well, the series finale airing during the spring I geared up for grad school applications and I only had one year left, then, in the office without The Office before I left that part of my life behind.

I don’t think there’s any point in the last decade and a half when I’d say The Office was my favorite show, but I also don’t think there was anytime in the same span when it wouldn’t have cracked the top five, or at least top ten. Moving in with Heather, we indulged in rewatches that often began with watching a single episode and then letting full seasons stream behind it. We watched it after Riley was born, often on in the background, a specific brand of comfort food when I don’t suspect either of us could fully process or follow a new show.

I hold no illusions about there never being a show as good as, or that I’ll like as much as The Office, for just as I’ve transitioned from Seinfeld and Friends to The Office and Parks and Recreation to Master of None, I’ve lived long enough, been open-minded enough, and surrendered myself to that which I find funny in the moment enough to know that there will always be another show to get behind and indulge in.

Still, I’ll be darned if I don’t laugh out loud every time Kevin spills his chili, when Deangelo juggles, when Janice scrambles to move the video camera and tripod in “The Dinner Party” or Stanley struggles to dribble in “Basketball,” despite Michael’s (racist) expectations. I still quote lines like that “I’ll send it back” a la Michael in “Mafia.” I’ll still beam with a certain pride when Michael turns the table in negotiations with David Wallace after he's underestimated in “Broke.” And there's no chance I’m not getting a little choked up when Chris Brown’s “Forever” plays in “Niagara (Part Two)” or when Andy references the good old days in “Finale.”

I not only remember, but treasure these moments for an earned sense of this show having been in my life through good times and bad, through transitions, through a sheer mass of years in my life.

It’s quite a show.

(And that’s what she said.)