In Defense Of The Office

A certain genre of essay has been cropping up in my reading orbit, extolling the virtues of remote work; it is, apparently, in apoplectic reaction to an opposing genre, appearing in mainstream outlets, of managerial types pining for a return to the office. Both arguments make me retch, as the latter do seem squishy and evasive on the actual benefits of working together in person, and the former conveniently use the roles of those leader-folk to position themselves as proletarian defenders, like no worker in their right mind, given the opportunity, would want to return to an office.

Allow me to argue in favor of an office, then, from a worker’s perspective. Working from home for the last year and a half has been a horrible experience, enervating and emotionally/physically detrimental. My apartment is no longer a place of respite; it’s a prison.

Much of my desire to return to an office may be specific to what I do: post-production on a TV show involves hundreds of terabytes of data, and the ability to share files and review cuts with dozens of people. Simply working off a shared physical server would eliminate banal but significant work of managing my own external drives, or ones that I have to request that take too long to arrive that require arranging hand-offs with couriers that are still too small that I have to keep track of that I will have to return; of time spent uploading and downloading; of setting up residential gigabit Internet simply to be able to download required media at a reasonable pace, which you might suggest I get reimbursed for by the company, to which I say lol why don’t you try; of relinking and matching file structures between collaborating editors and tracking versioning and syncing settings; of maintaining common libraries of often-used assets like sound effects and visual effects. In offices I have had IT teams to deal with technical issues; at home I have a Slack channel that is about as helpful, personal and/or timely as any pseudonymous Zendesk support email chain you’ve ever had the bad luck to get involved in.

More important than these little workflow grievances are the things the would-be workers’ rights writers sniff at: those ineffably crucial social relationships. Hoary cliches about the camaraderie of an office setting, about after-work drinks and break room shit-shooting and nonverbal communication are not myths conjured up by Peter-principle-good-for-nothings; they are things I have actually, scout’s honor, encountered, and they are things I sorely miss. They are not merely a nicety, or, as some of these polemicists seem to believe, a crutch for personable but untalented workers; they are crucial in an industry like mine, where unquantifiable traits like communicative compatibility and creative sensibility are key, and establishing friendly rapport not only makes the day easier and the work better, but leads to more gigs down the road. If people like these writers think face-to-face relationships insulate sociable but shitty laborers, the obvious corollary is that icy and impersonal remote work is a boon to apparently-competent assholes. Maybe they think that’s a good thing; I happen to think that’s a rather cold and calculating way to regard a team.

Other common complaints I’d like to counter: I do miss my commute (at least in New York, you’re getting a modicum of exercise); I miss going to a halal cart or a taco truck or Dig Inn or some dumb trendy poke place and having a sad desk lunch or, when there’s time, taking it to Hudson River Park or some weird privately-owned public plaza. Not because this is inherently special, but because I was able to see people milling around, to interact with or observe people I’d never meet through my own circles, feeling a part of the city (grandiose: humanity?), enmeshed in a way that is the reason why I live here and not in a sterile suburb. Because I am not a company man but a kind of permalancer, each new gig offers a chance to dip into a new neighborhood, to discover new things.

I’ll allow this: I am not comfy with digital communication. I may be a relatively tech-savvy millennial, but I resisted the idea of conversations fully over text messages longer than most people I know, and I still find them ungainly. I think this mode appeals to the kind of people who complain about how they “don’t know how to flirt”; they probably wish it was de rigeur to put “/f” at the end of any solicitous sentence. I am an anxious person, certainly not the best at reading tones or cues, but I happen to think this is a part of being in the world as a human, navigating ill-advised remarks and awkward locutions and not opting for sleek optimization. I am only recently an Extremely Online person, and even then, uncomfortable with it, and both unwilling and incapable of playing the game of getting good at it. I don’t mean to impute any of this onto the remote work champions, but one has to imagine that a writer in the current media climate is more likely amenable to this solitary, removed mindset than someone comme moi.

My personality and situation may render me particularly hostile to this viewpoint. My pandemic has been, by the charmed standards of my life, rather miserable: I have lost touch with friends (see again: difficulty with tech-based communication), I’ve been somewhere between moderately and suicidally depressed for a year plus, I’ve become lethargic and agoraphobic and fat and alcohol-prone and anhedonic and libido-less in ways I resent and despise (which makes all these behaviors compound and worsen, no matter how aware I am). I am getting kicked out of an apartment I love, I’ve been passed over for job opportunities I thought I’d worked hard to earn but I guess didn’t enough, and have no idea what my employment situation will be after September. Maybe all of this is because I am some Luddite unable to acclimate to the new world of TikTok and Zoom; maybe I’m just mediocre or a jerk; maybe simply a recipient of mundanely bad mental health and luck; but what little self-consciousness and -esteem I have left leads me to believe that this time of isolation and atomization has rendered me something and someone lesser than I was before.

I will add the necessary but hopefully obvious caveat that people in certain types of work, in certain situations, should have the option of telecommuting. Some parents seem to love it; it offers opportunities for disabled people (perhaps especially where I live, in New York City). I just find the In Defense Of Remote Work cohort unnecessarily flip and dismissive, too eager to suggest that the future is now, homebound, glued to screens, Seamlessing and Slacking and Zooming and QR-coding, forever.