The Days of Wine and COVID, Part IV — The Quad: Final Mix

Way back in 2020, I started a series of posts that covered how things were going since COVID sent us all home to work. For those interested, you can read them here: Part I, Part II, Part III. If anything they are interesting time capsules of how utterly weird things were while in the throes of a nasty pandemic and worth a look if you don’t remember or simply chose to forget all of that.

(For the record, me and the family have gotten COVID twice: one severe case and one that was just like a cold. And yes, we are vaccinated and boosted.)

But now that we are well past the middle of 2023, it’s time to update the series with a final post: going back to the office, for good.

Although Part III talked about how the office was being prepared for our eventual return, we’ve been sporadically working from there since March of this year for just a few days a week. That’s a stark contrast from the company’s initial stay-at-home-if-you-feel-safer attitude, and the reason for such a Damascus conversion was that corporate was feeling the heat from the building owners who saw nothing but unoccupied office space while we worked from home for three years.

And believe me, I get it. The company was paying rent for nothing while the building owners could have been renting out that space to someone who would be using it. As a result, they took away all but a few areas on the first floor and we now occupy all of the second floor. For comparison, we used to use almost three entire floors when I started there back in late 2015.

But before we returned to the office, we had some heated discussions with our bosses about our preference to stay working at home. I mean, our email signatures even touted that we were preventing the spread of COVID by working from home but could still offer all services while working remotely. There was also the promise from the CEO about staying home to work if we wanted.

But all of that that means nothing when corporate lays down Thor’s hammer and decides that’s it, and that’s where we are now. As a whole, things are as back to normal as we’ve seen since all hell broke loose — look around and you’ll be hard-pressed to believe that COVID ever happened with how we’re carrying on. That seems to be corporate’s mindset and why the push to work three days at the office is now happening.

And eventually, at least in my opinion, it’s a step toward rescinding our WFH privileges completely somewhere down the line — and the reason I’ve since removed the WFH part of my email signature.

Along with this push to return to the office comes some really odd and unfair stipulations for those who were hired during the pandemic and continue to work remotely because of their distance from the office. I’ll keep those details private but if put I was placed in that category, I would be none to pleased.

I’ve stated before that if anyone thought that we’d be working from home permanently, they were sorely mistaken. What we’ve done for the past three-plus years was an absolute necessity for the health of the office staff at one point but now that COVID is no longer considered a health emergency, it isn’t required. Well that’s until the next variant/strain rears its ugly head.

But one thing that they need to consider is that during the pandemic, peoples’ lives changed. Many moved away, even out of state, some in other countries were hired, and others sold their vehicles and are now relying solely on public transportation and ride-sharing services to get where they need to go. Even better, some hired to work remotely didn’t own vehicles to begin with so now they need to find ways to get to the office three days a week. Not an easy task when you live 45 miles away and 50 is the magic number to remain at working at home. Sure, ride-sharing is possible but absolutely not economical for that distance.

So that’s where we are now and I get the feeling that with all these new rules in place, we will be losing some good people regardless of where they work. As for me, I’ll soldier on with whatever they ask despite converting my den into a comfortable, kick-ass workspace complete with a stereo system that could potentially wake the dead.

This has been my longest tenure at any job for a myriad of reasons and I’ve reached a point to where retiring rather than finding something else would most likely be my next move. It’s a different working world out there and at my age of 54, I’m slowly getting left behind with what it demands despite what those LinkedIn Learning courses think they are teaching me. They are helpful but eh, a résumé filled with LinkedIn Learning certificates of completion isn’t all that impressive.

So yeah, it’s time to start thinking about that part of my life now.