For the past several years, I have done most of my job at home, frantically shouting into my MacBook during 16-person creative department meetings from the comfy confines of my elongated desk. I’ve done some work elsewhere—from various friend’s couches in various cities or in rustic hipster coffee shops, surrounded by gurgling espresso machines and seated on an unnecessarily uncomfortable metal stool and adjacent to three-hour latte chats between professional-looking adults who may or may not be gainfully employed.
Like many in the workforce, this setup has been convenient even if it has made the concept of “job” exceedingly hazy. This WFH arrangement has made me more productive, now that I am no longer required to fight against the effects of dissipating weekend vibes or fake laugh at corny office jokes that distract me from the 135 emails I have to send. At my core, I am a maladjusted semi-professional, and while I strategically gloss over this fact on my resume and during the seven rounds of job interviews it took for me to get this gig, this does make me reflexively hesitant to adapt to office formality. However, I was uncharacteristically calm and normal when my employer announced we were pivoting to a hybrid work model back in March.
Whether out of generalized anxiety disorder or my dog-brained craving for something new and different each day, I have embraced the hybrid model because it breaks up the inherently monotonous and cyclical nature of the workweek. Also, my interpersonal defects became glaringly worrisome after I realized that the downside of communicating without in-person cues is the constant internal turmoil of are my coworkers being mean to me? There is a certain orneriness and love of structure in careerists that are simply not present in me, and this is what makes them ideal in-office workers. But all things considered in this late-capitalist hellscape, the hybrid model is a reasonable compromise.
Now that hybrid is the white-collar norm, there is something bizarre about the way people describe their work schedules. When you ask a friend when they’re going into the office, they’ll say something like, “Well, on some weeks, it’s Mondays and Thursdays. Then, on some weeks it’s Tuesdays and Wednesdays.” This doesn’t sound like someone describing an adult job, it’s sounds like they’re discussing their kid’s taekwondo schedule.
On the days that I am in-person, it feels like I’m an extra on “Severance,” tensely wandering around a half-empty office wondering what happened to the memories of outside life. I’ll wake up an hour before I would normally roll out of bed so I can commute half an hour to check off my “2 days a week in office” requirement for Schedule Group B.
The CEO’s ideal for the hybrid model is “enhancing team collaboration.” In practice, this involves me taking my work MacBook from my home desk and transporting it to my office desk, then situating it in front of two Acer monitors that I have never used, one of which has two post-it notes at the bottom—one with the Wi-Fi password and one with a reminder I wrote when we used to work in the office full-time and it means nothing to me now. Since I made the grueling and arduous trek to be here, I’ll book a breakout room for the single 30-minute team meeting that’s on my schedule—and half of my teammates are in an entirely different country. Two junior-level minions will try to figure out how to work that three-pronged conference call speaker that no one knows how to use, and watching them struggle to configure this confounding device looks like they’re diffusing a bomb while negotiating a hostage situation. We end up calling on our iPhones anyways and I spend the entire meeting staring at a blank whiteboard wondering why this couldn’t have been summarized in an email.
The in-person workday amounts to roughly one-and-a-half hours of total work, eating an $18 salad, taking the train home, then getting an email from the office manager at 6:05 PM that says, “If anyone’s coming in tomorrow, we got bagels in the kitchen!” No, I will not be coming in tomorrow because it is not one of my taekwondo days!
All of this is worth propping up the commercial real estate industry.
Related Read
If you enjoyed this, here’s a series I wrote on how American work culture affected our response to the pandemic: