11 Moments of Chilly Autumn Work Mornings, Cozy Cups of Tea With Coworkers, Secrets Behind Office Doors, and Warm Fall Workdays

Every fall, our team decorates the office for Halloween, except for one room that’s always locked. We joke that it’s where the boss keeps underperformers. Last Friday, I saw the door open but got this weird feeling and decided not to look. On Monday, I asked a coworker to stay late with me, and we finally peeked inside. Turns out, the room was full of team-building photos, all those ridiculous monthly pictures we print of coworkers, handwritten notes, and Halloween decorations. And guess who was putting it all together? Our boss and the janitor! Apparently, they’d been secretly working on this little memory room after hours for weeks, adding things bit by bit to surprise everyone on Halloween morning.
Honestly, I felt so bad for snooping, but at the same time, I was kind of jealous. I’d give anything to be part of something like that, helping decorate and making something special for everyone instead of just showing up to work every day. I’ve always wanted to get to know our janitor better, too, because he’s genuinely one of the nicest people in the building. We apologized, and thankfully, they let us help finish everything as long as we promised not to tell anyone. So now we’re all keeping our mouths shut and sneaking around after work, waiting for Halloween morning. I think seeing everyone’s reactions is going to be worth all the guilt. I just hope nobody notices us acting suspiciously before then.

If you’ve never worked an outdoor loading dock at 5 a.m. in late October, picture numb fingers and coffee that’s lukewarm within five minutes. Our foreman barely says ten words a shift, so nobody expected him to start bringing in soup every Friday once the temperature dropped. His wife makes it the night before, he drives it in with the slow cooker wedged into a milk crate on his passenger seat, and it reheats in the break room until our first break at eight. It’s mostly chicken and rice, with the occasional lentil soup that divides the crew pretty hard. A few of us offered to chip in for groceries, and he flat-out refused every time. So when we hit our safety and output targets that quarter and the company paid out a small bonus, about half of us put part of ours toward a steakhouse gift card for him and his wife. He said, “You didn’t have to do that,” then went outside for a few minutes, and nobody followed him. It’s the best crew I’ve worked with in eleven years of warehouse work.

A coworker of mine lost her husband last spring, and Halloween had always been their holiday. Several of us had been to their house over the years, and they were the couple in the neighborhood with the fog machine and the full haunted garage. I’m on our office’s decorating committee, and we go all out every October, so as it got closer, we weren’t sure whether to go ahead as normal or tone it down this year. I finally just asked her, which took me about three days to work up the nerve to do. She thought about it and said she’d like to help, as long as nobody tiptoed around her. So a group of us stayed late on a Thursday, and she directed the whole haunted hallway like a film set, using a few of their old props she brought from home. At one point, she was laughing so hard she had to sit on the carpet. She told me later it was the first time since spring she’d felt like herself, and I’m glad I asked instead of guessing.

This is weirdly specific, but the second week of last November was the best week I’ve had at any workplace, so here’s the rundown. On Monday, my car wouldn’t start in the frost, and after I posted in our team chat that I’d be late, a coworker who lives fifteen minutes away offered to pick me up. On Tuesday, I found a mistake I’d made in a client report and flagged it to my supervisor, who took responsibility for it in the client meeting and then helped me fix it afterward. On Wednesday, the heating in our wing died overnight, and the facilities guy who opens the building dug two space heaters out of storage and had them running before most of us got in. On Thursday, I got a small birthday cake, which I later found out was because my birthday shows up on the shared team calendar. On Friday, I learned I’d be getting a spot bonus for a project I assumed nobody had noticed. None of it was huge on its own, and the bonus was modest. I’ve had bigger professional success since then, but that week is what I think about when someone asks whether I like my job.

I’ve been fully remote since 2022, and I’d more or less written off the cozy-office-in-autumn thing. Last October, my manager set up a fifteen-minute “tea call” on Monday mornings with no agenda and cameras optional. The first few were painfully awkward: six of us, counting my manager, sipping tea and commenting on the weather in our respective cities. Around the fourth week, one of our designers mentioned she hadn’t been sleeping well because her mom was going through chemo. Nobody made a big thing of it on the call, but someone started a side chat afterward without her, and the other five of us each put in $20.
Our manager checked with her privately that it was okay to send something to her address, and one of us ordered a box with sleep teas, a heated eye mask and a printed card everyone had signed online. She cried on camera the following Monday, then laughed at herself for crying, and that broke the ice for good. We still do the calls, and it’s the only recurring meeting nobody tries to skip.

This topic took me back to my first office job, around 2005, at a printing shop with maybe thirty employees. The owner’s wife did the books three days a week, and on the coldest October mornings, she’d come in early with a big pot of mulled cider. That fall, the company lost its biggest catalog client, and everyone assumed layoffs were coming before the holidays. Instead, the owner called us into the break room, ladled out the cider himself, and walked us through the real numbers on a whiteboard. He said there would be no holiday bonus that year, but nobody was getting cut, and he was reducing his own pay until they replaced the lost work.
Some people still grumbled about the bonus, which was fair, since a few of them had already planned around it. It took about eighteen months and two new clients, but the shop recovered, and the bonus came back. I’ve worked at much bigger companies since, with much fancier leadership offsites, and I can’t remember a single thing anyone said at them, but I remember that whiteboard.

It was my first week at a new job, and of course that’s when the first real cold snap hit (Toronto, late October, about −2°C in the morning). I showed up in a thin blazer because I’d looked at the weather the night before and somehow read Saturday’s forecast. Our building doesn’t switch from cooling to heating until November, so the office was sitting around 17°C, which doesn’t sound bad until you’ve been sitting still in it for a few hours. By our 9:30 team meeting, I was sitting on my hands, and the coworker in the next pod, who I’d said hi to exactly once, clearly noticed. After the meeting, she opened her bottom drawer, which was full of spare gear: two cardigans, fingerless gloves and a box of Yogi ginger tea. She handed me the gray cardigan and said she’d started keeping the drawer after her own first autumn at the company, when the same thing happened to her.
I wore it at my desk for about two weeks until the heating came on, and when I returned it, I gave her a tin of tea from the shop near my apartment, which she now calls “the rent.” It wasn’t life-changing, but it made a new workplace feel a lot less intimidating that first month.