Our neighborly paths have not crossed. But his wife mentioned he's a music producer—I can't be sure, because I haven't had the chance to ask him, as I haven't yet received an invitation to one of their rooftop parties.
Which is fine, preferred actually, because my rooftop gathering desires are more happy hour sunset oriented, whereas his, on the other hand, are of the loud, start early, and go late into the night variety. The kind that keeps you from falling asleep, or worse, wakes you from a deep slumber.
It was irritating the first night.
Then it happened again. And again.
And an irritation like that doesn't stay put. You start dreading the night ahead the moment you notice cars parking on the street Thursday evening. And then resent that you're lying there awake. And know that you're going to feel frustrated tomorrow, again, that you don't feel your best as you enter an afternoon of back-to-back meetings with a deliverable due the next day.
But I didn't call in a noise complaint. Nope. Yeahhh, it's an option, but we're also new neighbors, and so something like that should be down the list after other interventions have been tried. A worse relationship with a neighbor I don't yet know sets up a challenging future for years to come.
So I tried something smaller, something within my control, something that could arrive from Amazon the next day: a white noise machine.
It worked. And even if it hadn't, it still wasn't the only option. A knock on the door and a conversation was a possibility. Or maybe get to know them with an invite to our rooftop for a sunset happy hour.
The parties were happening either way. The only thing I got to decide was my move.
Work has its own rooftop parties. Like a lot of them.
The approval that takes three weeks for a decision that takes three minutes. A boss who forgot to say thanks for the extra effort. A meeting that should have been an email. A req you need filled that HR still hasn't posted. The performance review that didn't match your year.
Taken as independent experiences, work's rooftop parties are their own small irritations. But when they repeat, and they often do, they begin to compound—the same way a neighbor's week-after-week rooftop parties do. And somewhere in the repetition they stop being irritations and slowly become what you'd call your very frustrating experience of work.
The slowed decision becomes nothing here ever moves. The unposted req becomes I'm covering three roles and no one notices. The forgotten thank-you becomes they don't recognize my value here. None of these is the story on its own. Together, though, they stop being things that happened and become a thing you believe: this is just how it works here.
And that belief costs more than a bad mood. You came here to do something—to build a program, to route the help to where it’s needed, to make the decision that reaches a patient you'll never meet. Work's rooftop parties don't just keep you awake. They get between you and the work you came to do. That's the part that wears. Not the noise—the distance it puts between you and the work that should mean something.
When it grinds, we usually go looking for a someone. A bad boss. A shitty colleague. The person in HR who still hasn't posted the job. Blaming the someone is satisfying—it gives the frustration a face. But it's almost always aimed at the wrong thing, because mostly there's a system, quietly producing the bad bosses and the stalled decisions and the uncredited effort at a steady clip.
And sometimes, after enough nights of it, the face you give the frustration is your own. You start to wonder if you're the problem.
It's not you. It's not your boss. It's not even your shitty colleague. It's how we work.
So expect the rooftop parties. Not as a personal failing, not as a sign the place is uniquely dysfunctional—expect them the way I've learned to expect cars on the street Thursday night. It's what industrialized management does. Build a system to standardize, to scale, to control outcomes, and it will throw its rooftop parties. Reliably.
Which means they're the conditions you work in—and conditions that are here to stay can still be conditions you meet on your terms.
At home, we'll try a noise machine, or a knock on the door the next day, or an invite to a rooftop happy hour to get to know each other. At work, though, it can feel like the only option is to lie awake all night.
That's just not true.
Your work life can be actively shaped rather than passively endured.
That's the argument at the center of my booklet How's Work? A vacation reader for healthcare pros. It's a twenty-minute read that names what's happening at work and hands you something to do with it. It introduces The Good Work Life: a practice for understanding the system you're in and shaping your experience of it—even within a system you didn't design and can't control.
It won't hand you a noise machine for work, because there isn't one. What it does is quieter and more useful—it helps you see the rooftop parties for what they are, stop losing sleep blaming the someones for the noise, and notice that a small thing within your control, your version of the noise machine, is a perfectly good place to start.
You can read it online—it looks great off your work printer, too.