Office Space
It’s been a long pandemic. I’ve been isolated at home like so many of us for what seems like a decade. I’ve got kids half the time, and they have been great at giving me purpose and connection, but the other half of the time it’s just me and my two kittens who occasionally seem to like me “all right.” I’ve always considered myself an extrovert, but after more than a year and a half of this shit, I get anxious if I’m around too many people for too long. We’ve all been traumatized by the global catastrophe as well as the political insanity which has rocked the U.S. for what seems like yet another decade.
In the “before times,” I worked as a consultant/coffee-shop warrior for over five years, and at the end of 2018, when I finally got a job in an actual office, it was a relief. But those days are gone, and they aren’t (and shouldn’t be) coming back. With everyone remote, we’ve taken cars off the road, reducing traffic stress and the environmental impact of driving. The work-from-home thing was tough at first. But even though I was technically “working from home,” I rarely worked in my actual house. I’ve never liked to mix work with home life—there are just too many distractions, and I’m not afraid to admit that a big one is my Xbox.
Now, after such a long, chaotic stretch of time, I find myself loathe to return to the office. Corporate executives eventually discovered that not only could their businesses function with most of their staff working remotely but actually function more efficiently than they had before the pandemic. Of course, the rest of us already knew that the “office” was becoming obsolete, especially those of us who were working in tech. Despite that, rather than allowing us all to continue to work remote, some of us (myself included) were reclassified as “hybrid” employees. It doesn’t take effect until the new year, but I decided to see how it would feel by going in for a day.
I thought I knew what to expect, because back in the summer of 2020 with Covid in full swing, I had come to the office to retrieve a coat from my desk. Besides me, the only other living soul in the building was the security guard sitting at the front desk. I found things exactly where we had left them. Saint Patrick’s Day decorations hung from the ceiling and were taped to cube walls. Forgotten coats hung on the backs of chairs where they had been hastily left as the world began to change. Parts of the building sat in darkness, and fluorescent lights flickered here and there, where, under normal circumstances, they would have been replaced. It looked as if everyone had fled a zombie apocalypse.
This time it was different. The decorations had been removed along with everyone’s personal belongings including the long past expired food in the fridges, but the place was still a ghost town. Empty chairs and pieces of modular cubicles had been taken apart like giant Legos and piled in every corner. Several rows of workstations had been assembled in the center of the room with untouched paper nametags taped to their monitors for people that might someday return. A few employees meandered about here and there, and it was nice to see folks I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. But the place gave off a quiet, eerie vibe, and for some reason, despite the lighting, shadows seemed to be lurking in the corners of my vision.
I found my desk, said hello to the one coworker in my section, and plugged my laptop into its docking station with an audible click. I pulled up to my desk and got to work. For a bit, I actually got some work done in the quiet, Zen-like ambience, but after a few hours, I started to feel anxious. I wasn’t quite sure what was happening, but as the day wore on, it started to make sense. I had this feeling of a “before time,” of a forgotten past, as if I were sitting at a desk in a building in an abandoned town. I half expected to see a tumbleweed blow past.
In bygone days, when people had first started working in offices, there had been no alternative to having the proverbial “butts in seats.” Back then, everything had been on paper and filled out in triplicate. Workers could hear the rhythmic hammering of typewriter keys reverberating through marble halls, mixed in with the groaning of art deco elevators moving up and down on pulleys—seeming as if they might snap at any moment—followed by the loud dings as they approached each floor. The clomp of dress shoes and heels pounding on the hardwood floors added to the cacophony of those seemingly ancient spaces.
This is not that. The 20th century has since passed, and although the corporate world has fought to maintain the status quo, those days are gone. Twenty years into the new century we find ourselves with the technology to work and connect with people across vast distances without disrupting our work and even with all of that in place, it still took a pandemic to push us into this change. When Amazon recently tried to force their workers to return to their offices, the workers revolted, and even the “Great Behemoth” was forced to roll back its plans. And with the “Great Resignation,” workers have suddenly found themselves with power again.
Because that’s what it’s really about: power. In the early 20th century, the advent of unions forced corporations to provide better working conditions, benefits, and hours. Think what you want about unions, but in the beginning they were necessary and forced well-needed change. It’s different now with unions greatly weakened and with far less membership and power than they’ve had in the past. But in a way, an organic union of workers has come together across all sectors who have realized they aren’t where they want to be or being treated the way they should be. And all of a sudden, workers have power again.
We are at an inflection point of runaway corporate control and of a new kind of “Robber Baron.” It’s time for corporations and power brokers to give back—time for them to work for us, or at the very least, with us in partnership. It’s time for us to spread the wealth for the public good, not in a stereotypical socialist way but in a cohesive everyone’s-on-the-same-team way. It’s time for us to retake the public trust and for all of us (rather than a select few) to decide where our money and resources should go.
I’m not sure where the world is headed with a rolling Pandemic still in the mix any more than I’m sure where the working world will end up. I am sure of one thing, however: the days of everyone going “to the office” are over. Good riddance!
–Dave Page