Create One of Your Own “Empty Offices” at Home!
Quick tips for the recently disenfranchised
By Ed Goldman
U.S. offices are emptier than at any point in at least four decades,” the Wall Street Journal reports, “reflecting years of overbuilding and shifting work habits that were accelerated by the pandemic.”
Fortunately, I’ve always resisted the urge to overbuild or shift my work habits (the latter being what you’d find if you looked up the word “ambiguous” in the dictionary).
You’ll never work alone…
My own office is just as small and empty today as it’s always been—except for the years when my tabby Osborn the Magnificent would drop in, take a look at the cozy bed I’d fixed up for him beside my desk then walk back out, which qualified him both as ungrateful and the best co-worker ever.
I’ve been to some of the once-bustling/now-moribund offices the article references and it’s eerie—like what you imagine things would look like after the deployment of a neutron bomb, which destroys every living thing in a structure but leaves the structure intact. I’ve had housekeepers like that.
Now, I see why so many people, even those completely enamored of their new work-at-home lives, can feel nostalgic about the all-too-recent good ol’ days. Incidentally, shouldn’t a minimum number of years need to elapse before you can describe anything as either “good” or “ol’” and certainly as both? If you agree, IM me. But first, please fax me what IM stands for.
What do people really miss about being in a traditional work environment? Office parties? Office betting pools? Office canned-food or toy collecting drives? Midge-from-Accounting’s Christmas rum balls?
Do we mourn the immediacy of office gossip, of timing how early one of our colleagues leaves for the day or of speculating who’s going to beat us to the promotion or performance bonus we’ve been gunning for since the moment we hired on?
Sure, we can still do that in the privacy of our own garage, dining room or basement work space. But does that provide the same you-are-there sensation as being able to buzz the person in your abutting cubicle at 2:30 p.m. to whisper, “She’s wearing a different outfit than when she left for lunch at 11 with the boss”?
Do we miss fighting for a parking space we’re paying for or being charged a Third World Nation’s monthly budget for having a reserved one? Do we pine for the break room, with its 1987 refrigerator from which our lunch bag frequently went mysteriously missing? How about the pre-measured coffee-filter machine or the last-cleaned-last-year microwave so we can zap the bear-claw someone left in a crumb-filled, rifled-through pink cardboard pastry box from a birthday party yesterday afternoon?
Resourceful non-returners have discovered they can re-create much of the familiar office environment in their own homes. For example, they can spy on their neighbors to monitor comings-and-goings (and likely discover it’s just as boring as wondering about who in the office is slipping off at lunch with whom, and how often). They can ignore cleaning their microwaves for weeks, just as they do in the break room. If they leave their lunch bags out and have a dog, they can enjoy the same sense of moral outrage when it disappears—though the at-home suspect tends to leave more obvious clues, like a glob of peanut butter on their snouts.
As for the heart-racing joy of parking-space combat, this is easily renewed at home if you have a single-car garage, more than one car or more than one teenager. You’ll need to work out the particulars. I’m late for a meeting for which I no longer need to wear pants—presuming it’s taking place on Zoom. If not, I know whom they’ll be talking about in the break room tomorrow.
Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).
