Today many of us who work outside of our homes who were fortunate enough to have a long holiday weekend celebrating the efforts of the American workforce will return to our cubicles, classrooms, construction sites or wherever it is we earn our living.

And chances are, whatever our place of business, we will not be alone when we get there, like it or not. Wherever you work, whatever you do, more often than not you do it with other people. 

I very rarely write about my job because I like it and I need it, but what I will tell you is that I like my co-workers. Shhhh....I KNOW. I am fortunate enough in the place where I am currently employed to have a number of people I not only like, but also consider my friends. These relationships range  from 9-5 work friends - the kind where you go to lunch occasionally or chat in the halls every day but never see outside the office - to people I choose to see when I'm not on the clock in a variety of settings, for an equal variety of reasons.

This has not always been - and is still not always, depending on the person - the case. Some people I've worked with I've been just as satisfied never to see again when the last bell rang. Some people I was close to in particular jobs but after they were over, life and time took us down different paths and we are no longer close.

What I do know is that I spend a lot of time at my workplace, doing my job. It helps both my mental health and my productivity if my relationships there are at least benign and civil, whether it skews in the pleasant or the apathetic direction. (Some people? No vibe, right? It's just the way it is.) But the relationships I've formed that run deeper than your average Girl Scout cookie purchase or chat around the mailboxes evolved because I at first liked and then discovered that I really dug the person that my job placed in my path. I connected with him or her beyond spreadsheets and meetings and quarterly reports. (Because honestly, I can't say I've ever connected with anyone over a quarterly report or any of these things for that matter beyond a hatred of all of them, pretty much.) I would have been friends with these people if I'd met them in my neighborhood or in school or through another friend, because our personalities clicked, we had things in common and we turned out to enjoy each others' company. I consider them a prize I won because of my job, not a guarantee of having it.

Because the deal is I'm careful when it comes to workplace relationships. If they work out on a more friendly level, great. That's a bonus. I just don't really go to work anymore expecting to find friends, or look to my workplace connections to fill my social or emotional needs. I have a pretty clear cut mission in my profession and a population I serve that takes a lot of time and energy and that's why I'm there. I've also been burned in the past because for years I was way too trusting and ended up in interpersonal situations that were less than stellar because I assumed people at work were my puffy-heart-I-can-tell-you-anything friends when really, they so weren't. Oh no. They were not.

The opposite of friendship at work is at its best normal human interaction and at its worst horrible conflict. Anyone who's been there can tell you that dealing with conflict and difficult personalities in the workplace is a trial that can reach seemingly unmanageable proportions, and spending multiple hours in the presence of people who don't bring out the best in us or vice versa often doesn't seem worth the paycheck. (Except, you know, when you need the paycheck, which I always do.) There are reams written about dealing with toxic workplace people and I won't rehash them here, except to say: when you have to, it's difficult, and I hope you don't.

This is not to say it can't be difficult to navigate friendships, much less romantic relationships (which I'm not even going to deal with in this forum) when professional lives are attached. If you're working with a friend on a project and disagree about how it should play out or have some other professional difference of opinion, that can create strange dynamics. I think it would be difficult to be tight friends with a supervisor or a supervisee. Professional stakes and interactions are, for the most part, quite different from the personal, and meshing the two can be tricky. And I can't say there haven't been times when people who are my friends - outside of the office, on a different level - have done things that I haven't found palatable at all, that, in fact have irritated me to the point where I can remember it still. (But that's no one I know now, right? I mean, just so we're clear.)

If the friendship matters to the two people involved though, hopefully the communication skills are there to hash it out, for the greater good of the organization and for their personal wellbeing.

And even though these things happen, snafus and misunderstandings and what have you, I'll take the risk, because for one thing you can't help it when you find people in life who are meant to be your friends, no matter where you find them, and it stands to reason that at least a few friendship-worthy people would turn up in a place where we spend a lot of time. And beyond that, I have to say it isn't so bad to have some (real) friendly faces either at your office door or on the other end of an e-mail during a stressful workday. The vast majority of the time - for me, anyway - it's worth any potential pitfalls.

Other voices around the Web:

Amber Hensely wrote a guest post in Grace Boyle's Brazen Careerist spot called How to Be Chummy With Your Co-workers Without Crossing the Line. Bottom line: proceed with caution, and I totally agree. Embrace the boundaries. Boundaries are good.

Working Girl Two in Chicago realized she had work friends when another colleague pointed out how much time she'd wasted talking to them on her first day back from vacation. She still thinks it's a good thing.

Kristina at Writing for (Y)Eu changed her mind about making work friends when she moved to Brussels to work for the EU. It just didn't happen in Estonia but in her new home, many of her good friends are also colleagues.

Katie at KC's Masterpiece misses her old work friends at her new job.

And just for grins, Marcia McCormick posted this list on the Workplace Prof blog of 20 strangest complaints hiring managers have received from across the country, according to CareerBuilder.com. Whereas I MAY at some point have agreed with "Employee's aura is wrong" and "Employee breathes too loudly," I have never experienced an "Employee smells like road ramps." Rest assured my best workplace friends would not be responsible for this: "Employee eats all the good cookies."

Photography and extend family contributing editor Laurie White writes at LaurieWrites.