There is no shortage of office workers who, still, after all these many decades of progress and what the more traditionalist types might call devolution, believe firmly in the status quo trajectory: surrender your soul at the door to the corporate building, match your paycheck dollars to a 401K and save for something that you can’t enjoy until later in life, when it won’t mean half as much to you anymore.
Those experiencing the zygote form of this developing superiority over “eternally single” people like Jennifer Aniston’s character in Picture Perfect who has to pretend to get engaged in order to even be considered for a promotion tend to make said self-perceived superiority well-known. Just “happening” to mention what they and their significant other did last night–“we saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare in the Park!”–or “happening” to drop that things are getting serious with their sig other because they’re finally going to his parents’ house in Long Island for the weekend.
All these “subtle” ways in which the standard-grade office worker tries to make the less conventional, forced-to-work-in-an-office ilk (it’s like when Claire Standish in The Breakfast Club knows she doesn’t really belong there) feel bad about themselves would be better suited to sheer, all-out honesty. Why don’t the Bevs and Johns (because office personnel is forever rooted in the 50s) of the building just say what they’re truly thinking to these “lesser” employees, the ones who haven’t fully bought into the yarn that’s been spun? It would show at least a modicum of gumption. But then, the unspoken prerequisite of any profession set in the office milieu is spinelessness.