New Workplace Epidemic Identified (Because Hating Your Job Needed a Fancy HR Term)

It's called "quiet cracking" and it's as woke as it sounds.

As a reminder, I am out the rest of the week so I’m recycling a few older posts I hoped you might enjoy. Don’t miss me too much… see you back here on Monday. ;)

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My very first job was at a “healthy” fast-food joint in Florida called D’Lites in the mid 1980s. The “healthy” part was the twenty-foot salad bar, brimming with “nutritious” options like imitation bacon bits, sunflower seeds rolled in sugar, marshmallow ambrosia, reduced-fat cheese, and croutons the size of Rubik’s cubes.

Salad bar duty was the literal worst. In addition to having to constantly refill a hundred different compartments, the management at D’Lites was fanatical about the lettuce. It was the centerpiece of the whole salad station; a giant plastic canoe filled with wilted iceberg chunks that Store Rules insisted must be piled precisely as high as the canoe was deep.

To achieve this noble goal, once an hour or so, you’d have to lug that giant tub to the walk-in refrigerator, which housed several industrial-sized trashcans filled with replacement lettuce floating in frigid water. (No, the bins were not lined with trash bags; I assume they were purchased expressly for this purpose and weren’t previously used for actual refuse, but I never asked.) Attached to each trashcan was a metal colander on a chain—ostensibly so no one would abscond with it?—that was just long enough for the colander to sit on the floor of the refrigerator when it wasn’t in use.

I wish I was making that part up. Or any of it, really.

This was the process: Remove the lid of any random trashcan, dump the remaining contents of the canoe into the watery-lettuce mix (did you think they made us toss the uneaten half in the trash-trash? Hahaha you’re cute), and then—after pushing your sleeves up into your armpits—bend over and use both of your naked arms to swish that whole mess around really good, making sure you shoved at least half of the old stuff toward the bottom for a solid old/new mix. Of course, I never once saw them completely empty those bins and start over with farm-fresh greenery, so “old/new” is relative here.

Finally, you’d use the colander—the one resting on the floor by your feet—to scoop out a “fresh” new batch of piled-high lettuce, which you would proudly return to its place of glory on the buffet of bad decisions.

(I have told this story dozens of times and the response is always “You’re lying!” but I pinky-promise you I am not.)

I was fifteen and needed money. I did what I was told. I do not think I suffer any lingering PTSD over the experience. And yes, I still ate there.

So you’ll forgive me if I’m less-than-sympathetic to a newly identified workplace woe called quiet cracking. This, gentle readers, is not the same thing as “quiet quitting,” which was popularized during the pandemic and is generally described as “doing just enough to not get fired.” No, this is a new iteration of employee dissatisfaction marked by “a subtle, often invisible erosion of morale and motivation.”

URGENT HR MEMO: “Your employees are miserable—and you don’t even know it!”

Quiet cracking is being called “the silent strain HR leaders can’t afford to miss.”

Even when I entered the real workforce in the early 1990s, there was no such thing as “quiet cracking.” In fact, there was no such thing as quiet anything. If you were unhappy in your job, you either quit in a blaze of glory, got yourself fired for telling your boss to shove it, or drank half a pot of Maxwell House, lit a Marlboro in the break room, and powered through until you died of natural causes at 48.

That was it. Those were the options.

If you think I’m exaggerating, keep in mind this was an era when your boss could sidle up to you at the Xerox machine, give you a solid smack on the ass, and say, “Good hustle out there, kid.” That counted as positive reinforcement. HR was a lady named Carol who reminded you to sign your timesheet and occasionally brought donuts to staff meetings. You could have an actual mental breakdown at your desk, and you’d be lucky if one of your coworkers didn’t use the time to poach your sack lunch from the communal refrigerator.

But I’m supposed to care that the woke industrial complex is being plagued by an epidemic of muffled misery (which, as far as I can tell, is when you continue showing up for your shift even though you’d rather be surfing)? I thought that was called work.

Regular readers can probably guess my theory about what’s driving this so-called phenomenon; namely, that it’s yet another predictable result of a generation raised on “everyone gets a trophy,” where showing up to soccer practice and picking dandelions on the sidelines earned you the same medal as the kid who scored eight goals. Now that those kids are grown, they’re realizing the workplace doesn’t hand out ribbons for doing the job you were hired to do, and it’s a full-blown existential crisis.

Also to blame, in my rarely demure or tentative opinion, is the gentle parenting approach popular for the last few decades—the one that taught kids that their every emotional fluctuation was worthy of a family summit, three hours of active listening, and a feelings chart. Fast-forward to adulthood, and the first time a manager fails to praise a formerly coddled kid’s “effort” in rebooting the office router, they’re Googling “early retirement” and silently splintering like a dollar-store popsicle stick.

Back in my day, your parents prepared you for the working world by telling you that you looked fat in those jeans and making you mow the lawn in August. Do you think I felt entitled to a meltdown in the D’Lites walk-in fridge because I was making $3.35 an hour to get neck deep in a trashcan full of lettuce water? No. I churned that nasty garden slop around, scooped it up with the floor-colander like the guy paying me told me to do, and presented it unflinchingly to the public. I probably don’t need to mention that I never even got a trophy for surviving that salmonella obstacle course.

Obviously some jobs are worse than others, and I’m certainly not suggesting that quietly suffering actual workplace abuse is admirable. But more often than not, a position is just a paycheck. You give up your time and effort and someone else hands you money in exchange. It’s a transaction, not a self-esteem retreat. And unless your boss is also your life coach, it’s not her duty to validate your mood swings or curate your sense of purpose.

Call me a bitter boomer, but here’s how I see it: we’ve replaced scooping trashcan lettuce with singing about organic spring mix, and now nobody’s tough enough to top off the canoe. Give today’s workforce a few shifts in that fridge and I bet they’d either stop “quietly cracking” or start loudly quitting in under 24 hours.

Either way, problem solved.

Tell me about your worst employment experience in the comments—and feel free to share your best advice for the silently suffering workforce out there.

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