My Fathers Office is the third episode from the first season of The Wonder Years.
The episode begins with Kevin talking about how Jack always comes home from work grumpy. After a typical bad day of work, Jack sulks in front of the television, while Kevin and the others walk on eggshells to avoid his wrath. After an especially bad day of work, at night Jack goes outside to look at the stars, through his telescope. One day, Jack comes home and yells at Kevin for leaving his bicycle in the driveway where it could have been run over. While on the bus, Kevin, Paul, Wayne, and a friend discuss their desired future careers and back-up careers, which leads to Kevin realizing that, beyond being a manager at Norcom, Kevin does not know what his dad does at work. Kevin asks Jack, who initially doesn't want to talk about it, but after a talk with Norma, Jack decides to take Kevin to work with him the next day.
While at work, one of Jack's employees messes up on an order, using a new shipper without Jack's consultation, resulting in it being late, which Jack initially gets angry over, but then decides to deal with it later. Jack takes Kevin to the break room when the phone rings, but he decides not to answer it, despite his secretary warning him that it sounds important. While in the break room, Kevin asks Jack why he wanted this job. Jack reveals that he didn't really want this career, surprising Kevin by saying that he had wanted to be a baseball player (the job Kevin currently wants when he grows up) and had a back-up career in mind where he would be the captain of a ship, using the stars to navigate. But then after college, he got married, got a job on the loading docks of Norcom, and worked his way up. Jack explains that people can't always have the jobs that they wanted when they were younger. With this lecture, future Kevin says that he started to see that, while the family was lucky Jack had his job, his father deserved better than he had. When they return to the office, Jack gets told off by his boss over the messed-up orders, as well as for not answering the phone when he called him earlier. That evening, both Kevin and Jack come home in a sulky mood. Later that night, as Jack looks at the stars through his telescope, he invites Kevin to join him, and as the two look through the telescope, Kevin has newfound respect for his father, and understands why the stars give him solace.
Includes examples of
- Bittersweet Ending: Jack gets chewed out at work, but Kevin comes to understand why his father gets to be so angry after work, and gains some respect for his father.
- Coincidental Broadcast: As Jack arrives home from work in an irritable state, the family is watching a nature documentary about gorillas whose commentary mirrors the situation in the Arnold home.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: This episode has a rare scene that Kevin does not appear in, which the narrator acknowledges and says that he can only imagine what happened here.
- Imagine Spot: Kevin imagines himself running the company, with Wayne an employee who has to please him.
- Ironic Echo: Not word for word, but when Jack chews out Kevin for carelessly leaving his bike where Jack could have accidentally run over it, he says "if you don't want to take care of it, you don't have to have it!" Jack's boss chewing him out later is similar, with the similar line "if you can't hire competent employees and supervise them, we'll find someone who can!"
- Mean Boss: Jack's boss, who viciously chews him out in front of his employees and Kevin. Given this is his only scene and he does make good points, he might not normally be this mean.
- Obliquely Obfuscated Occupation: What the whole episode revolves around. Kevin realizes that he has no idea what his father does for a living, and for the most part neither does anyone else in the family. By the end of the episode Kevin, and by extension the audience, have a pretty good idea of what Jack actually does (manage the department in charge of distribution and customer support, basically trying to make sure his employees do their duties competently, and taking the heat for it, from his superiors when they mess up), but the trope still applies to the company he works for, as the product Norcom actually makes is never specified, beyond being some sort of electronic "thingies" that are used on toasters and coffeemakers, and that Karen claims they have military applications.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Jack at work. He tries to keep his patience with his employees, even when things go wrong, and accepts responsibility from his own superiors for the mistakes his employees make.
- "Take Your Child to Work Day" Plot: Kevin's interest in Jack's job (and why he's never in a good mood at home) inspires him to directly ask his father what he does; not satisfied with the answers he gets, Jack offers to take him to Norcom the next day.
