There are very few of us that work in our office (6 people). We all get along like family. We greet each other every morning and stop and chat a few minutes throughout the day. One of my co-workers left a few years ago and took another job. She was miserable, the pay was good, but the job wasn't because no one was allowed to talk. She said if the boss caught you talking, he said you didn't have enough work to do.

In my office we're like family (without the fighting). Love it - I'm only female & old enough to be everyone's mother except our manager & i'm still 10 years older than him.

In my department, we are a chatty bunch. But my company is very large (over 900 in this building alone) and all departments are very different. There are times in my area when everyone is working on a project or whatever, that it's really quiet and everybody just keeps their head down and working. But generally we all say Good Morning and Good Night to each other. On some occasions we'll hang out at each other's cubicles discussing TV shows! Actually, in a cubicle environment, you usually know everybody's business whether they like it or not...LOL. I've retreated to the parking garage to make personal phone calls on more than one occasion, that's for sure.

If you work in a busy call center...like the phone company...it is more difficult to chat be cause everyone is on the pphone with customers...we sill did get a manage little chatter.

It depended on the day. I worked in an accounting office and due to the deadlines sometimes it was wheel to the grindstone. End of the month, we were pushing to get everything in. First of the month, we were reporting the previous month activity and balancing. Not a friendly time, business required full attention. Not rude, just busy.

The size of the different departments also had an effect. Twenty good mornings over 30 minutes makes the 30 minutes shot. 2 or 3 not so much of issue.

I worked in offices for 11 years, rules were liberal, we always said, "Good morning" and a lot of chit chat before we said, "see ya tomorrow". It can be very annoying when someone wants to chit chat when I had a lot of work to complete before going home, and there was a very sneaky girl who pretended to be visiting my desk, but was snooping, she would run and start rumors or tell the boss something to upset her. After a while we knew she was trouble, most people ignored her. There's always one in every office!

One of my high school students had to live with us for a while. Second semester, she was a coop student who worked half days in a local plant office. When she first took the job, she was over the moon because everyone was so friendly except for this one girl in the office, a real sourpuss. This drove our girl crazy as she was a real breath of sunshine all the time. She (like most high schoolers) wanted to "fix" this situation and pressed me for ideas. All I could think to tell her was to treat her the same as all the others and to pray for her a lot. A few days later she came bouncing in the house after work yelling "It's working!" I loved it!