Some personal news: I am conducting a social experiment. Actually, it’s less of a social experiment and more of a Frankenstein type deal. You see, I am trying to turn a French person into a fun coworker, i.e., I am trying to bring a man to life.

Let me back up.

There are two and only two parts of French office culture that I wish the US would embrace.

The first, the true lunch: Instead of eating lunch at your desk, where you can’t even be that productive because one can’t really type and eat at the same time, you take the full hour you are (or should be) allotted and eat with your coworkers seated at a table without a monitor on it.

The second, the true vacation: When you are on vacation, you do not work. You do not check your emails and you certainly don’t respond. (Are you very senior and important? Okay, congratulations little miss name-on-the-door, in that case you follow a model where you are accessible on short trips but have an annual hard disconnect of 2-3 weeks where even you are not to be contacted unless there is a crisis on the scale of, perhaps, a bomb hitting the parking lot of your hotel.)

The rest of French office culture I am mostly neutral about. (Office culture — not to be confused with labor laws or government-mandated perks. I am also very fond of receiving a variety of checks, stipends and reimbursements and the near-impossibility of being fired.)

There is, however, one enormous quality I abhor: the heads-down, no-fun, church and state approach to their oft-glorified work-life balance. It is nigh on a dissociative disorder.

When the French are at work they are at work and they are gonna work unless explicitly taking a break to have a coffee, smoke a cigarette or lunch for 1-2 hours. (These stereotypes are true.) They are WORKING or they are OFF.

Cool. We love boundaries. But it means there is almost no goofing off, no fucking around. I am willing to acknowledge this could be the corporate nature of my current situation, but even when I was at a French start-up, they kept it mostly buttoned up at work and the sabers only came out after hours.

My job, which includes both working on projects that have a direct bearing on the ways of working of a 380,000 person hospitality group and also functioning as an ad-hoc camp counselor for the comms department, often involves me begging, badgering and bullying my coworkers to stop working for two goddamn seconds to eat snacks and shoot the shit as a team. For a country known for being work averse, I have never met a group so suspicious of being asked to block half a day for non-work activities.

As a side thought, there is also, if I may be so bold, an art to complaining about work that the French, in my own personal experience, have yet to master. In its platonic form, there are two variations of the work-related rant: the rageful and the petty.

When the complaint is born of genuine injury, injustice or even incompetence, it can and should be expressed with earnest anger at what is actually a serious problem. When the qualm is petty, related to someone or something being annoying, dumb or nonsensical, invoke a bitchy meme or threaten some act of hyperbolic violence and keep it moving.

For me, the French complain (blah blah blah yes its their national pastime) about petty concerns with a heaviness that sucks the fun out of complaining. It is simply exhausting to hear that much unserious negativity cut with absolutely zero levity. Bitching about work should be fun! Fun, or blood-boiling.

Back to the point though: I get it, being asked to socialize at work sucks. Mostly because work sucks! And work is always gonna suck, even in an enlightened culture like France that has laws about disconnecting, every type of union under the sun and three billion vacation days.

But all those stay-wokisms about corporations not caring about you (true!) and not mistaking your job for your family (don’t!) are mostly about your relationship to management and like, boundaries for when, why and under what circumstances you work. You can indeed still, and I would argue need to, develop a rapport with your coworkers that is, if not familial, at least akin to that of Ms. Frizzle’s class as they rocket down some rando’s aorta for the fourth time in a semester.

We spend, at minimum 35 hours a week at work. Most of us spend at least 22 of those hours at an office physically around our coworkers. Assuming eight hours of sleep a night that is 32% of our waking hours in some degree of contact with these people.

Work-life balance is important of course it is but when work represents so much literal time in your life, surely we could consider trying to bring some life to work.

This is one arena, along with salary, where US office culture has the French beat by a country kilometer. Americans have what is often described as a hellish relationship to work, but hell is fun as…well, hell.

The most fun job I have ever had was working at a small advertising agency in Chicago. There are lots of details that question the causality of what I am about to posit — mostly that it was my first job out of college and thus I was young and light on responsibility — but to this day I believe working at an advertising agency is (used to be?) one of the most fun gigs in the world.

This is partially because I come from ad folk. (A list of family members who have worked in advertising: my grandfather, my aunt, my uncle, my cousins, my mom and my dad — yes I was a Chicago ad world nepo baby, thank you for asking!) My dad, in particular, always seemed to be having fun at work and working with fun people.

Anyways, my time at the agency rocked. Not only did I make friends who are still my friends today, but we had weekly in-office happy hours and of course annual parties but just based on day-in-day-out interactions, I genuinely felt that I had that Magic School Bus rapport with my coworkers. We had lively Skype (?) chats and feuds and cliques, but it was fun. Even when the work was killing you, it was fun. There was camaraderie. There were shenanigans.

Like any sane person, I have settled myself client-side but I have friends who work at agencies in Paris and while yes they have almost all made friends at the agencies they work at, I can’t remember any of them describing their office as fun. More often, they talk about how working at an agency is driving them to question whether they want to be in marketing/comms/etc. at all. French agencies make people want to leave them — I spent far longer than I intended to at mine because it was such a good time.

My other office job in the US was a more complicated mess of emotions (including a lot of rage) but I cannot and will not deny that it was fucking fun too. We laughed all the time in the office, there were at least two office clowns, and if we weren’t having fun, we were in each other’s DMs talking shit. Sure there was a bit of trauma bonding involved (in the intuitive but technically incorrect sense of the phrase) and the six months the office was overrun by a racist misogynist were decidedly Not Fun but we followed that up with an absolute bender nine months marked by a move to an office downtown and, for some reason, expense cards for nearly everyone. The company was being sold and we treated that limbo time like the open tab of a check we were about to run out on. Which I guess we did?

And I suppose in defense of the French, my first job in France was also very fun. Mostly because they invested in out-of-office activities and were big partiers, fueled by start-up-going-through-a-good-moment energy and a passion for, as I alluded to, sabering open champagne bottles. But the office environment was also great — plenty of jokes and ribbing and laughs. Until the company hit a rough patch, the vibes nose-dived, the jokes began to hit different and I updated my resume.

Which is how, among other reasons, I have found myself where I am today: In a job I love, maybe more than any other job I’ve ever had, but where the fun derives nearly entirely from either, shockingly, the work itself or from my lifelong ability to entertain myself.

I simply don’t understand why it has to be this way.

One of the things you could read in my performance review is that — contrary to the impression I may give — I don’t complain without also trying to find a solution.

Which brings us back to my efforts to bring a 6-foot-something* body mass to life. After about two months of conditioning, my Creature is showing about the same level of reactivity as when you tap a knee with that little triangle thingy and while he has begun to make jokes, it’s hard to say he has a pulse. Unless otherwise prompted, he still mostly just comes to work and works and leaves.

A true scientist considers all possibilities and it did occur to me that this man may simply be boring. Is his seeming lack of any defining characteristics the by-product of French office culture? If it is nurture and not nature, can it by overcome by sheer force of my personality?

I have decided that I will have my answer, and I will know I have succeeded — I will know that the lifeblood of Fun flows through his veins — when he, of his own volition, shares a crispy bit of hearsay, expresses desire to defenestrate himself or someone else, and/or suggests we leave the building to gossip, bitch or rant through channels that cannot be subpoenaed.

Alas, I fear we are far from such a scientific breakthrough. He is French, after all, and they don’t even have a word for silly.

*Forcing a mention of a man being 6 foot is cringe, however, here I believe it to be in service of my Frankenstein’s creation metaphor.