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The Signs as Characters from The Office

Aries: Stanley Hudson

Taurus: Oscar Martinez

Gemini: Angela Martin

Cancer: Phyllis Vance

Leo: Andy Bernard

Virgo: Jim Halpert

Libra: Erin Hannon

Scorpio: Dwight Schrute

Sagittarius: Darryl Philbin

Capricorn: Kevin Malone

Aquarius: Michael Scott

Pisces: Pam Halpert

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Inspired by the season 7 episode of The Office “Goodbye Michael.”

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me

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Huh?

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The Signs as Described by Creed Quotes

Aries:

Taurus:

Gemini:

Cancer:

Leo:

Virgo:

Libra:

Scorpio:

Sagittarius:

Capricorn:

Aquarius:

Pisces:

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what she says: I'm fine.

what she means: You can't tell me the whole Scranton branch didn't shut when Michael and Holly got married. That they didn't fly out to Colorado to see Michael marry the girl of his dreams. You can't tell me Michael didn't try to get Ryan to be his best man but when Ryan ran away, he asked Dwight instead. That Jim wasn't a groomsman. That Cece wasn't the flower girl. That Andy didn't sing the song Michael and Holly danced to. That Kelly and Andy didn't have another dance off and this time, Andy didn't have to go to the ER. That Phyllis, Pam, and Erin didn't cry when they said I do. That Michael didn't ask Erin for a dance. That the whole office didn't plan a flash mob like at Jim and Pam's wedding. There is no way none of this didn't happen.

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J I M 🔥Y O U R E 🔥6'11 🔥A N D 🔥Y O U 🔥 W E I G H 🔥9 0 🔥P O U N D S 🔥G U M B Y 🔥 H A S 🔥 A 🔥B E T T E R 🔥 B O D Y 🔥 T H A N 🔥Y O U 🔥 B O O M 🔥 R O A S T E D 🔥 D W I G H T 🔥 Y O U R E🔥 A 🔥 K I S S 🔥A S S 🔥B O O M 🔥 R O A S T E D 🔥 P A M 🔥Y O U 🔥F A I L E D 🔥A R T 🔥 S C H O O L 🔥 B O O M 🔥 R O A S T E D 🔥 M E R E D I T H 🔥Y O U V E 🔥 S L E P T 🔥W I T H 🔥 S O 🔥M A N Y 🔥G U Y S 🔥Y O U R E 🔥 S T A R T I N G🔥T O 🔥 L O O K 🔥 L I K E 🔥 O N E 🔥 B O O M 🔥 R O A S T E D 🔥K E V I N 🔥 I 🔥C A N T 🔥D E C I D E 🔥 B E T W E E N 🔥 A 🔥 F A T 🔥J O K E 🔥A N D 🔥 A 🔥 D U M B 🔥 J O K E 🔥 B O O M 🔥 R O A S T E D 🔥 C R E E D 🔥 Y O U R 🔥 T E E T H 🔥 C A L L E D 🔥Y O U R 🔥 B R E A T H 🔥 S T I N K S 🔥B O O M 🔥 R O A S T E D 🔥 A N G E L A 🔥 W H E R E S 🔥 A N G E L A 🔥 W H O A 🔥 T H E R E 🔥 Y O U 🔥 A R E 🔥 I 🔥 D I D N T 🔥 S E E 🔥 Y O U 🔥 T H E R E 🔥 B E H I N D 🔥 T H A T 🔥 G R A I N 🔥O F 🔥 R I C E 🔥B O O M 🔥 R O A S T E D 🔥 S T A N L E Y 🔥 Y O U 🔥 C R U S H 🔥 Y O U R 🔥 W I F E 🔥 D U R I N G 🔥 S E X 🔥 A N D 🔥 Y O U R 🔥 H E A R T 🔥 S U C K S 🔥B O O M 🔥 R O A S T E D 🔥 O S C A R 🔥 Y O U 🔥 A R E 🔥 O S C A R 🔥 Y O U R E 🔥 G A Y 🔥 A N D Y 🔥 C O R N E L L 🔥 C A L L E D 🔥 T H E Y 🔥 T H I N K 🔥 Y O U 🔥 S U C K 🔥 A N D 🔥 Y O U R E 🔥 G A Y E R 🔥 T H A N 🔥 O S C A R 🔥 B O O M 🔥 R O A S T E D 🔥 A L R I G H T 🔥 A L R I G H T 🔥 E V E R Y B O D Y 🔥 Y O U 🔥 K N O W 🔥 I 🔥 K I D 🔥 Y O U 🔥 K N O W 🔥 I 🔥 K I D 🔥 Y O U 🔥 G U Y S 🔥 A R E 🔥T H E 🔥 R E A S O N 🔥 I 🔥 W E N T 🔥 I N T O 🔥 T H E 🔥 P A P E R 🔥 B U S I N U E S S 🔥 S O 🔥 U H 🔥 G O O D N I G H T 🔥G O D 🔥 B L E S S 🔥 G O D 🔥 B L E S S 🔥 A M E R I C A 🔥 A N D 🔥 G E T 🔥 H O M E 🔥 S A F E 🔥

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That's what

She

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Interesting.....thoughts?

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Happy Holidays -- it’s white elephant season.

this was simultaneously the best michael moment and the best prank on the show

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Stanley yells at Ryan for flirting with his daughter.

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Post 10: Goodbye, Storyworlds

Goodbye, Toby (S4, E18-19),

Goodbye, Michael (S7 E22),

Goodbye, Storyworlds.

The end of this blog coincides with me watching the episode Goodbye, Michael (S7 E22), which to many die-hard Michael Scott-era fans, marks the real ending of The Office. Goodbyes are hard, and both you and I know them. I started this class 14 weeks ago barely able to use a Tumblr, and now I’ve figured out to write poignant stories and hyperlink them as PDFs. Progress, right?

My goal for this blog was to finish watching The Office (US) and supplement my Netflix-binging with informative and analytical posts to help new viewers learn more about the series and seasoned watchers uncover new insights between the characters and plot.

While I have not yet achieved the former, I hope that I have accomplished the latter. My understanding of The Office’s theoretical underpinnings were largely discussed in my origin story and satirical mockumentary posts. 

The show largely serves to poke fun of American corporate life. If the average American works 40 hours a week from the age of 20-65 and gets two weeks of vacation every year, they will have worked a total of 90,360 hours of their life. The day-in and day-out 9-to-5 often characterizes the average American’s life. If you were to ask someone about themselves, they might introduce themselves as “Hi, my name is ____ and I work at ____.” A poll of 18 European countries counting the number of hours people work in a year on average shows that the country with the highest number of hours, Switzerland with 1,310 hours per year, is still slightly higher than the US’s annual average of 1,353 hours per year. The least worked country from that set of 18 European countries is Italy, with 960 hours per year, an average of 20 per week.

Do Americans prioritize work above other facets of life? Does our country need labor to maintain our premise of universal dominance? Is greatness derived from capitalism? The answers to these questions reveal why The Office is so relatable. To stretch the conclusion further, perhaps a less work-driven force and/or economy less based on or sustainable upon capitalism and industry are reasons why a show about the workplace would not fare as well in other countries. As noted in post 3, The Office has eight other adaptations all in countries who work fewer hours per year than those in the US do (with the exception of Chile and Israel, who top the ‘most hours worked’ chart -- perhaps they were too busy to watch the show!).

Whichever set of factors explains this phenomenon, I hope that viewers alike can enjoy and appreciate the show. If I were to update my existing posts, I would discuss this theory of American capitalism being closely entwined with work and workplace culture in more depth. I think that my first four posts had the most meat to them -- after that, I tended to explore more specific avenues of the show (specific characters, a theoretical plot twist, a specific memento) rather than examining the underpinnings of the show as a whole. While seasoned watchers praised my analysis of Jan, less experienced watchers may not have understood my critique. I intended for the first half of this blog to serve as an introduction and the second half to explore specifics, but I realized that I gave away some key plot points in my character/plot summary in Post 2.

If I were to restructure the blog, I would:

spread out the character map post or trim it down

expand on my explanation of the ‘translation-based’ posts (Chinese version, analysis of song lyrics)

talk about thematic elements such as music and cinematography

discuss other Dunder Mifflin branches and real-life adaptations (fan art, merchandise, spin-offs and cast reunions)

Jim : So I've been meaning to tell you, I wanna take you out for lunch. For your last day.

Michael : Oh...

Jim: What do you think? Tomorrow? Lunch, you and me?

Michael: Okay...

Jim: You're not leaving tomorrow. You're leaving today, right?

Michael: Maybe.

Jim: Wow, so that's it, huh? Just four o'clock and you are gone for good.

Michael: Why am I so sad? Am I doing the wrong thing?

Jim: Absolutely not. It's just that sometimes...goodbyes are a bitch.

Michael: [pulls out a tape recorder and speaks into it] T-shirt idea: "Goodbyes Stink." [puts tape recorder away] Okay, alright. So, James Halpert. [starts to cry] You started with this company as a fine young man...

Jim: You know what I think we should do? I think we should just save the goodbyes for tomorrow. At lunch.

Michael: Oh, okay.

Jim: And then tomorrow, I can tell you...[tears up]...what a great boss you turned out to be. The best boss I ever had.

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Post 9: An Analysis of ‘Lazy Scranton’

Click here to download a higher quality .docx file of this analysis.

Lyrics provided by The Office Wiki.

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Post 8: The Quest to Find Love

The Office can be considered both a sitcom (situational comedy) and mockumentary (see Post 4). In the past three sitcoms I’ve watched, the others including FRIENDS and How I Met Your Mother, the main character’s quest to find love drives a significant part of the plot line. Certainly many a fan has cried tears over Ross and Rachel’s tumultuous relationship, and noone can deny that HIMYM is driven by Ted Mosby’s misadventures in love. 

The pervasiveness of such themes as love and romance in American media shows through song lyrics, romance novels and movies. Perhaps these enduring themes can be traced back to one medium - the romance novel. The romance novel started as a subgenre of literary fiction in England during the 18th and 19th centuries. Particularly influential are the works of Jane Austen, namely Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.

The romance subgenre of literary fiction is "...a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents" - Sir Walter Scott

The Office opens with the infancy of Jim and Pam’s relationship, which goes from flirtatiousness to a declaration of love to Pam’s independence and eventual new relationship with Jim. Besides the alpha couple, numerous other romantic relationships spring up.

As you can see, characters in The Office have a variety of dating styles. The average character has roughly 2-3 different relationships across the show’s nine seasons (Angela, Andy, Erin, Kelly, Ryan). However, serial daters might have as many as 5-6 distinct partners (Michael), and those in committed, long-term relationships might only have had 1-2 partners (Pam, Jim, Phyllis). 

The majority of relationships occur within the workplace, but a notable few do not. For instance, Phyllis Lapin and Bob Vance start dating and become married in Season 3. Bob works for Vance Refrigeration, which is on the same floor as the Dunder Mifflin Office and close enough for the two to correspond throughout the day. Another case is Oscar Martinez and Gil, who dated from the pilot until Season 3. Since Oscar is gay, he has a smaller dating pool than the rest of the office and therefore has not engaged in relationships with the rest of the office members. Lastly, several of Michael’s girlfriends and flings have not been office employees (Carole, Helene, Donna). Perhaps Michael would’ve run out of women to date if he had solely dated those who worked at Dunder Mifflin.

The main idea is that many pivotal plot moments are, or occur directly due to the progression of a romantic relationship. If average fans of The Office recall the show a decade after its ending, they might pick out a few keyphrases of ‘Jim and Pam’ or ‘Michael’s quest to find love’ that they remember the most vividly. I surely don’t blame them -- TV romances, and romance in general, has a way of penetrating our pathos and eliciting strong emotional responses from the audience. We either love a pairing (#OTP), hate them, or want to be them. It’s just human nature, and humans can’t stray too far from love.

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Post 7: The Office (Chinese version)

I’m doing a translation project for my Chinese class that crosses over into The Office storyworld and thought it would be fun to show here!

The episode I translated is ‘Take Your Daughter to Work Day,’ the 18th episode from Season Two. In this episode, Michael allows his employees to bring their daughters to work and show them around the office. This results in a variety of different children visiting the office, from Toby’s young daughter Sasha to Stanley’s teen daughter Melissa and even Meredith’s son (who is suspended from school for the week). The employees try their best to entertain the kids, and by the end of the day, both Jim and Pam make new friends.

The closest Chinese counterparts for each character’s name:

Here’s my translation for a scene from this episode:

View the full presentation here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=13Ei3yZESWmcp3_svIfNI-MnbaZsLVzTsqYQxq5_ZVy0

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Post 6: Justice for Jan Levinson

Unpopular opinion: Jan Levinson, while unanimously feared and disliked by those in the office and warehouse, actually is a character that deserves more recognition. 

Her sexy, dangerously controlling nature always intrigued me, and I thought she had a softer side which exposed itself in rare, exciting moments. I didn’’t think The Office’s writers did her justice by nearly writing her out of the show mid-season five. As actress Melora Hardin (who played Jan) says in an exclusive interview with Buddy TV, “I really like Jan. Although she might be manipulative at times, I think she’s got a good heart and is really trying her best out there in life, even if she trips up a bit or things don’t go her way.”

I find the episodes in which Jan shows her softer side to be very endearing, perhaps because these emotions are coming from a character who is usually so nitty-gritty and commandeering. Many of these episodes encompass Jan and Michael’s relationship, which starts as a woozy, one-night stand (or so Michael has us believe) after a business meeting (S2 E7) where Michael impresses Jan by winning over a client. Prior to this, Jan saw Michael as a nuisance who offered the office zero professionalism. At this point in time, Jan is Michael’s boss and works as Vice President of Sales at the corporate office in New York. However, closing the sale resulted in Jan being impressed with Michael and them drunkenly kissing and spending the night in a hotel; however, Jan wants to forget that this ever happened the morning after. During the rest of Season 2 and half of Season 3, Jan continues to treat Michael in a typical boss-employee manner. Their relationship resumes again shortly before Back From Vacation (S3 E11), where it is later revealed that the two took an intimate trip to Sandals, Jamaica on short notice.

Hardin prides herself on recreating a character who borders on inappropriateness, even if she doesn’t identify as Jan herself. Jan is a funny character not for her sense of humor, but rather for the oxymorons she represents. For instance, she is supposed to keep her relationship with Michael secret to avoid any conflict of interest. However, she comes to Scranton from New York City on several occasions to see Michael, and some (ok, most) of these visits involved them getting sexual in Michael’s office. During work hours. In broad daylight. If that’s not inappropriate, I don’t know what is.

The downside? I date Michael Scott publicly and collapse into myself like a dying star. 

--Jan in Cocktails (S3 E18), when the two become official

Another instance of Jan’s inappropriateness is when she tries to get Michael back after a brief split in the middle of Season 3. She comes back to his office to woo him, and he is ready to tell her no, until he sees her new appearance. Jan is intentionally wearing a very low cut V-neck to expose her new boob job, and as expected, this move reels Michael back in immediately. 

Despite sounding distasteful, I personally find a lot of Jan-induced situational humor hilarious. Out of context and perhaps injected into another sitcom, Jan might be looked down upon. However, intermixed with the themes of sexual harassment and inappropriateness from The Office, Jan fits right in. She is the very definition of a femme fatale who carries her sex appeal on her sleeve and Michael’s dignity on the other. 

Towards the end of Season 3, we can already see Jan’s career trajectory begin to unravel. She is fired from her position as VP of Sales for being “extremely unstable” and “unable to complete her work.” As she struggles with unemployment, she begins to live off Michael’s money and spends it recklessly. Michael doesn’t have the heart to tell her to stop and she is unaware of her bad habit for a while until Michael finally takes Creed’s advice to “Declare bankruptcy!” In a dramatic moment during Money (S4 E4), Michael hops a train in a last-ditch effort to get away. However, Jan is driving up to the office and runs after him. She finds him, apologizes wholeheartedly for not realizing she was putting him in such a tight financial situation, and declares her appreciation for him. While her delivery is a bit constrained, it is the most emotional, kind and genuine I had seen Jan to this date.

A rare display of kindness from Jan.

The entire premise of Michael and Jan still remains an example of a dysfunctional relationship, which culminates in a violent ending during Dinner Party (S4 E13). This continues Jan’s purpose as a character who exudes inappropriateness. Her relationship with Michael in an ideal office either never would’ve happened, or would’ve been kept under wraps until either of them switched teams so they weren’t directly managing or being managed by the other. However, the tension and contrast between the two characters is so strong that, to quote Hardin, “[it] ...had you dying for the two characters to hook up.” Opposites attract, and that certainly was the case with Michael and Jan until the physical aspect of their relationship was no longer enough to sustain it.

While Jan’s character analysis is primarily shaped through her relationship with Michael, there are several interesting plot lines I am interested in seeing her play out post-breakup. After Goodbye Toby (S4 E19) towards the end of Season 4, Jan is largely written out albeit a few mentions in Season 7 and Season 9. Her last appearance includes a platonic encounter with Michael at the supermarket, where she reveals she is pregnant. Michael at first is in shock that she cheated on him during their relationship, but she clarifies that she is expecting a baby girl via artificial insemination. Michael congratulates her and spends the rest of the day feeling as if he just found out he was the father (not the case). He offers to accompany Jan to Lamaze classes and helps her out with chores out of the goodness of his heart. However, this ‘fatherly role’ ends after the baby is born. Jan did not notify Michael that she was going into labor as she didn’t want him to become overly attached to a child that wasn’t his. Michael is visibly upset when he finds out Astrid, the baby girl, has already been born. The season concludes when Michael finally meets Astrid, but he doesn’t feel the same connection with the baby as he does with someone he truly cares for, [SPOIILER] his new love interest, Holly. [SPOIILER]

Throughout her ups and downs in the first four seasons, Jan Levinson is truly a remarkably mysterious character. Since I haven’t gotten to Season 7 yet, I’m not sure what has become of Jan since the end of Season 4. I am interested to hear about her relationship with her daughter and whether she is back on the dating market. I am also eager to see her interact with Michael again, and to see whether the two are awkward exes or remain on good terms. While every person has their flaws, Jan seems to be an amalgamation of many different character flaws I myself and most people around me possess. It surely is interesting to watch a character full of vices play herself out on screen, and it helps us viewers out with our character flaws by distancing ourselves from her for better or for worse. Thank you, Jan. You are the antithesis of pure and evil we don’t deserve.

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Who’s ready for Christmas, already?

Photos of the Christmas party from Michael Scott’s digital camera