The United States of America is planning to get its workers back in offices soon. Goldman Sachs and Amazon expect the office staff back from 1 July. Ernst & Young has already called them in. As per data released on 29 March, 24.2% staff in ten big American cities has returned to the office. Difficult to say if this post-vaccination euphoria is premature. Time will tell.
Employees, by now accustomed to getting up from bed
and going over to the computer, not having to iron their clothes, not worried
about commuting, will need to re-adjust to the new old life. The white collars
who have resumed work still find old social distancing and traffic flow signs
lingering in the office building corridors.
Brittany Dales, 27, a legal secretary returned to her
Californian law firm recently. One of the attorneys started talking to her, the
printer was running, and there was office noise in the background. Brittany
couldn’t focus, because she had grown accustomed to working in a quiet place
for a year. Even a little bit of noise, not too loud, felt unbearable.
*****
Maura Judkis, a features reporter for the Washington Post, this week describes
the reactions of different employees returning to work for the first time.
Ellery Frahm is an archaeologist who studies artifacts
from nearly 500,000 years of human history. When he reached his desk in his
Yale University office, he found a phone number written in his own hand in March
2020. Just a number with no name. He tried hard to remember whose it could be
and why he wrote it. He could have called the number and tried to find out, but
he felt awkward after a year’s gap. Maybe the other side also wouldn’t remember
what the whole thing was about.
Vanessa Jae, 25, from Sterling Heights, Michigan was a
little shaken when she saw that her wall calendar was showing March 2020. When
she left office in March 2020, she had expected to be out for two weeks, not
thirteen months. Papers were still spread out on desks. On the side table, the
coffee pots still had coffee inside. Next to them was a half-finished bag of
chips.
*****
Tim Halbach, 41, a meteorologist working for the
National Weather Service had visited his office last time in October. In March,
back in office, he went to the fridge in the office pantry. He wanted to put
his turkey sandwich in the usual place, the back corner of the top shelf. He
was stunned to see a Turkey sandwich was already there. It was his
five-month-old sandwich. He had forgotten about it. The two sandwiches looked
identical. The five month old sandwich showed no signs of decay. It bothered
him as to why no rot was visible on the old sandwich.
*****
Some people opt to call the offices they re-visit time capsules. A massive event has
separated the office workers from their own past.
Ralph Esperas, 33, a marketing coordinator from an
Arizona company was overwhelmed by a sense of sadness on seeing his dusty desk.
It made him think of the lost time and lost lives.
In most offices, the un-watered and un-cared for plants
have died.
Alex Grimaudo is a graduate student at Virginia Tech. During
lockdowns, he couldn’t complete his fieldwork, and was forced to change his entire
dissertation. When he saw his jacket hung on his chair, the coffee mug in its
place surrounded by his old papers, he felt he had walked into a personal
museum.
*****
The scene in the office reminded Ellery Frahm, the
archeologist, of Pompeii, the city frozen in time in 79 AD. That year Mount
Vesuvius erupted and buried the city in volcanic ash. Fleeing residents had
left their bread in the ovens, their shops were later found mostly intact. In a
recent excavation study, much tangible evidence of daily life was found in that
place.
If you are an office worker returning to your desk
after months, you are likely to feel like those archeologists.
Ravi
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