Work friends are the people who’ve seen you at your most tired and still saved you a fry.

Exhaustion strips the performance off people. By hour seven nobody has the energy to be impressive, so what is left is how you treat each other when the dining room is wrecked and there are two hours to go. Something gets built there that polite friendship never reaches, and it usually shows up as food left quietly where you will find it.

Take those people seriously even if you would never have picked them. Learn one thing about a coworker’s life outside the job this week. And do the small unprompted thing for somebody mid-shift, because that is the currency in that building.