It’s been a long and tiring last few weeks at work. A handful of colleagues have left, some voluntarily, others less so. Some new processes have been put in place. A new layer of management has been put into place. It’s been a period where everyone seems to have something to complain and be mad about.

“Feels like almost everyone is grumpy,” a colleague said to me today.

“What do you mean?” I responded.

“Just seems like pretty much everyone in this office is frustrated by something from what I can tell,” he said back to me.

Yeah, that’s probably true. Most of us in this office do our jobs and do it well. When you’re in a remote office, you have to work twice as hard and advocate for yourself three times as much before anyone really cares about anything you do. And that’s been wearing thin on a lot of us lately. Sometimes, you don’t want to constantly yell and advocate for yourself; sometimes, you just want to be noticed for good work you are doing and have someone else call it out for you to the “powers that be” and get you recognition.

In the corporate world, though, even in late-stage tech startups like my own, that can be like pulling teeth. This is the life of being at a pre-IPO technology company.

Tonight, our office hosted a happy hour to bid farewell to a colleague of ours, who is leaving to start a new job at another tech company. To be honest, the majority of us are not going to miss him; he was an HR nightmare with the inappropriate jokes and comments he’d openly make, and what was worse was that he had zero shame and felt like he was being victimized for getting called out for what he perceived to be “normal” conversation and behavior. I heard he was good at his job, so from a competence standpoint, I never doubted him, but from a peer-to-peer standpoint, I really did not care for him at all.

But, hey, any reason for the company to host a happy hour and get us free food and drinks is fine by most of us. Our office manager was told that we actually didn’t spend that much of our “social events” budget last year, so this happy hour is on the company. What better way to get people together than with free food and booze?

“How was your weekend?”

This is the usual question you get every Monday when you go into the office. Everyone has a long laundry list of things they need to achieve and get done for the week. And this question, as generic and as cliche and routinely repeated as it is, is so annoying, even when I myself often ask it.

The way I usually want to answer this question is…. “too short.” Two days off in a week is too short when you have errands to run, an apartment to clean, laundry to do, countertops to dust and disinfect. The amount of time actually spent “relaxing” on my own is so little. Sometimes, you have weeks when even socializing feels like work. And this was one of those weeks.

I want what Adam Grant advocates for: a four-day work week. That would be quite glorious, and I think we’d all feel more fulfilled and as though we were more productive.