My husband is the reason I started watching The Office.
He's also the reason I started watching Grey's Anatomy but he prefers to deny that one (we watched the first two episodes which he had recorded ON VHS when he was visiting me at college and then we finished that and saw that the Pope had died).
(I'm still watching Grey's but ready for it to be done with it's run any season now, or like, 5 seasons ago. Matt gave up somewhere around season 2 and now mocks it. AS IS he knows what working at a hospital is like.)
He introduced me to The Office the summer right after we got married. The infamous Casino Night kiss aired 2 days before our wedding and when I finally got to that episodes months later I called him at work and left him a screaming voicemail somewhere along the lines of "YOU DIDN'T TELL ME THEY KISS! HOW COULD YOU WITHHOLD THAT INFORMATION FROM ME."
Matt worked 2nd shift the year we were engaged (literally got that job offer within an hour of me moving home from college, ending our 3 years of long distance), the first 2 years of our marriage, and then we had our "year of hell" when he was in school AND working 2nd shift. I was a mostly full-time accountant at the time working a normal 8-5 (besides tax season, I do not miss a single thing about tax season). I spent nearly every evening at home by myself, adjusting to living in the city when I had grown up in the country. I was VERY paranoid about every single noise and preferred not to open a single window or blind. I would turn on The Office DVDs every night to have some white noise in the background. I knew season 2 very well over the course of our first year of marriage.
I talked more about our long history with the show back on this post, dressing as Jim & Pam for Halloween, having our own finale viewing party (with snacks, for the 2 of us) when Luke was about 6 weeks old, etc.
When I was watching the show I remember thinking how it would be a much
more exciting place to work than the actual office where I worked. I
didn't realize at the time how much I could relate to many of the story
lines since I was spending 40 hours a week in an actual office. It was
certainly a time.
The Office is really having a moment right now, they say it's due to Netflix (where it is no longer...WHO is paying for Peacock??) and the pandemic streaming habits and such. It seems to be a bigger deal then when it was actually on the air. There are a whole bunch of new merch coming out for the show and books and podcasts and I've consumed/read/owned a great number of it all. It's rather nostalgic (can I already say that about things that happened in my early marriage???) and comforting.
We did own The Office merch back in the day too, here's us, not even 6 months into marriage with The Office t-shirts bought from CafePress. I most definitely got the same one that Jenna Fischer (Pam) had written about on her MySpace blog that she owned too (I still have it but it has shrunk.):
And then nearly 2 years later, in 2008, I got a Dunder Mifflin sweatshirt (which I still own even though it's rather faded and stretched out) and a trivia game (which I no longer have since it only had trivia for the first few season). Side note, those purple hand weights in the background...still use those almost 5 mornings a week (I have changed up my workout routine many times since 2008).
Besides those things (and my original Dundie, which I also still have) and some lingering items from the Target Dollar Spot when they had a WHOLE BUNCH of The Office merch for $1, here are newer items that we've somehow consumed:
Yes, I own these even though we have very few Little People besides the Nativity. Yes, they are still in the box because I don't know if I'd let my kids play with them (also, the boys are kinda out of Little People). But I still bought them for a purpose TBD.
I bought this last fall and it took me awhile to actually read it to the boys because I wasn't sure how they would take it but then they actually like it quite a bit! I had it in our fall book basket and I read it to Sam at least once a week and he asks me all the character names and why Toby doesn't have a partner. I don't think he has any idea it's based on a tv show (Luke knows) but he still enjoys the book and I enjoy so many of the little hidden jokes.
I've written about this one before, it was on my list of things I like way back in January 2020 (ahhhh...those innocent times) and I've listened to every episode, starting back when they started them in fall 2019. I'm close to caught up with my viewing of episodes in relation to the one they are talking about (only behind by a few) and I enjoy their BFF banter and deep dives into random topics as well as talking about the episode (they are definitely the best of the 3 rewatch podcasts I listen to). (The other two are for different shows.)
This was a short run of episodes that was an (obviously) oral history of the show. It was only on Spotify which was annoying but I still listened to and enjoyed all the episodes. Putting together an oral history is FASCINATING to me and feels like SO MUCH WORK. Pulling together SO MANY interviews with so many people. Just 12 episodes around 40 minutes each.
This one takes the interviews used for the Oral History podcast plus adds more interviews (I think). There are 1-2 episodes a week and can be 40-90 minutes. I have also listened to all of these, usually saving them for Saturday mornings when sorting laundry or changing sheets or whatever. Brian (who played Kevin) is a pretty competent interviewer and is a bit less gushy than the Office Ladies.
This one I haven't read yet, it's not out yet, and I'm not sure I will. If it's just the oral history podcast in written form...I've already listened to those and my book reading time is precious. Do I need to read another book about The Office, especially after reading one and maybe already consuming this same content in a different way?? Probably not. Even I am not that much of a completest! We'll see on this one.
This is one I've written about already, bought it, read it, and enjoyed it! It was before the oral history podcast and the deep dive podcast so a lot of this information was new when I first read this. I read this in the early days of the pandemic and while I wasn't rewatching the show like a lot of people seemed to during that time (besides maybe trying to keep up with Office Ladies) this book still brought a lot of levity to those confusing and exhausting days.
I did not purchase this one but did request that my library purchase it and then I checked it out (I am 95% sure the library buying staff rolls their eyes when they see my frequent purchase requests come through (95% of which are for picture books)). When reading it I couldn't decide if it was super cheesy or actually pretty funny. Cheesily funny I guess? This would be helpful if you are having a viewing party of any sort.
That feels like a pretty good representation for now! I'm sure there are things I'm missing but for a tv show that went off the air 8 years ago, this still feels like it's getting plenty of cultural attention right now. It's a show it feels like nearly everyone of my generation has seen, when I run into someone who hasn't it's quite shocking! Definitely an era defining show, even this many years off the air.
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