Careers stall due to laziness, a lack of new job skills, or a refusal to remove that therapy mushroom farm you’ve been growing at your desk. Working harder or going back to school are fine for people with grit or wealthy parents. But this odd obsession with fungi has become a metaphor for your career. You’ve attached yourself to a host workspace. You’re growing out of this company. And at some point, we’ll need to extricate you so we can have that desk back.

Emulate Young People

Getting to know young colleagues can be intimidating to those suffering through late-stage career malaise, with their perkiness and ideals and odor-free nuance. They smell like success instead of mildew and earthworm. They have fancy vests and have not been warned repeatedly by the Ergonomics Division about toxic molds infesting the air ducts. Young people have one thing in common. None of them spend the day going desk to desk, hawking oddly shaped spores to fellow employees. Just stop it and get back to work.

Buzzwords

Disruption. Next-Gen. Guerilla Marketing. Artisanal. Blockchain. Thinking Outside the Box. You’re using the buzzwords all wrong. You’re not Disrupting Big Mushroom with Next-Gen product. Painting faces on mushrooms, fixing them with little coats and hats, and placing them in the cafeteria is not how to Guerilla Market your Artisanal brand. Blockchain is not what you place around your mushrooms every time you leave your desk so no one steals them.

These are buzzwords that used to mean something around here when someone self-importantly dropped them in meetings to shake up the status lingo. Now they are associated with complacency and pestilence. Everyone knows you’re not under your desk Thinking Outside the Box. You’re down there scraping a fungal chunk from beneath your workspace that has gone AWOL from the cardboard box therapy farm. They have integrated with the cords and wall sockets and electrical grid. The lights in the bathrooms flicker anytime someone flushes. This is not something we can Take Offline, or Whiteboard. Your mushrooms are Disrupting office sanity.

Tracking Your Data

At any stage of one’s career, it’s important to be on the right side of the numbers. Are the company’s financials trending upward? Does your role have a positive impact on the bottom line? Taking a look at the below chart, it’s clear that since you installed the mushrooms and then claimed them as therapeutic with HR to prevent them from applying pesticides to your workspace, things are clearly not trending toward a promotion.

Ripple Effects

A weak performer impacts everyone’s career. Our infatuation with you has offset our vocational aspirations. We spend our days watching to see what you will do next. We barely pay attention to the quality of our work. Every meeting, task, and client inquiry is a burden that takes away from our ability to rubberneck at your train wreck of a workstation and gossip about it endlessly. We recognize ourselves in the little mushroom people you dress and place in the cafeteria. This office has become a dependent ecosystem collectively decomposing as our careers limp toward insolvency.

Quiche CV

The mushroom quiches have been delightful. Please continue with this type of start to the workday.