I read this pretty good article in the Walrus about Return to Office orders. Like most Walrus pieces, it’s well-researched and reported, but the journalist has to throw in that they’ve only ever had two brief in-office roles, they were both internships and terrible and they never got anything done. They’re pretty sure those are representative of office work as a whole. So that’s not…great.

You should read that article—it really is good—but I do find people really tell on themselves when they say they must work from home because they just CAN’T work in offices. Which means they were kind of scamming their employers up until March 2020, one supposes? Similarly, managers and employers who say employees have to be in-office because otherwise how will they monitor productivity tell on themselves as not knowing how to manage, right? Surely there are other management tools besides simply staring? Ways of assessing work output and quality to ensure the company is getting value from their employees besides I See You Sitting Over There?

You might almost think there would be something in the job description that would either make it a certain amount of in-person interaction useful, or it wouldn’t. As opposed to management not wanting to actually look at people’s work on the one hand or employees not wanting to put on pants on the other. Both arguments are essentially beside the point if the job being argued about actually matters. Which one starts to wonder about. Like it wouldn’t matter where anyone was sitting or what they were wearing if you were able to just look at the work itself and say, “Ah, that is obviously good work” or “That didn’t seem to go so well,” and if the latter, you could try changing the location of the employee and see if that helped.

I don’t really know how other people’s jobs work, and I haven’t had that many myself but I think these things are…situational. Some meetings really do better in person, and some it doesn’t matter all that much. Some tasks are just going to be done alone in silence so you might as well be at home with the cat in your lap if that’s what you prefer. Some people who are struggling learning a new skill really need in person mentorship; some do not. Some teams that are not gelling well need a brainstorming session, a group lunch, fewer impossible assignments, or just to be left the F**k alone for a bit—it really takes some thoughtfulness on the part of the manager to know which is which. No one thing—”collaboration” or pantlessness—is a panacea.

But what do I know—I’ve rarely been a manager and, as I say, haven’t had that many jobs. And the WFH debate, like maybe every debate, has thrown into sharp relief how different I am from apparent norms. It is good for me to learn these things—I am not the zeitgeist, and should perhaps not lead with what I personally would prefer in these discussions. But it is startling.

For example,

When people say, It’s so great working from home because I save so much money on commuting, I realize that my life is different because I pay $156/month for a metro pass and beyond that I walk places. When I don’t commute to an office, most months I still buy the pass so that I can go other places (some low-impact months, I pay per ride, but costs are only slightly less). Walking is free. I do now have access to car, as I did pre-pandemic, but I only ever drive/drove once in a while, because you can’t read while driving and because I don’t like it, so I never calculated gas costs into my commuting. This, I guess, is not the norm.

It’s so great working from home because I save so much money on work clothes. I did dress slightly nicer when I worked in an office, but by and large, I wear loose cotton dresses, smocks, jeggings, and tights every day, wherever I am. I am currently wearing a blue linen dress from Old Navy on which I have gotten compliments and which cost $30. I have always worked in “creative” industries so I think I really just don’t understand what people (women?) go through on this.

It’s so great working from home because I save so much money on work lunches. This one has to be a mass delusion. Almost every day I work from home, I make the same salad I would have eaten at the office and eat it out of a bowl instead of a washed-out yoghurt container. Occasionally when I’m home I get wild and make eggs. I heat up leftovers in the microwave at home exactly the same as I did in the office, only at home the microwave is generally cleaner. It is possible that I have saved a tiny bit of money not going for lunch with colleagues every few weeks to some compromise-type restaurant like Kelsey’s, but I would gladly trade that $30 to be able to goof-off with colleagues over a mid quesadilla for an hour. I once saw someone’s cost-savings food accounting online, which they managed to get up to $65/day, via TWO coffee runs, lunch out and also for some reason breakfast, which is not even a meal you are out of the house for in a typical office day. It honestly sounded like a pleasant and delicious day, such as I might indulge in on vacation or my birthday, but the idea that if you are forced to leave your house you have to eat this way seems very strange to me.

It’s so great to be working from home because otherwise I would have to talk to my colleagues, and I don’t like talking to my colleagues/don’t like my colleagues. This one I’m honestly still confused about. I have liked my colleagues over the years in about the same ratio as I like most people, which is mainly pretty well, with some outliers on either side of the bell-curve being people I really disliked and people who became ride or die. I enjoy talking to people about the weekends and craft projects and children and whatever else. I am definitely that person who wondered if you were going to become friends outside the office, whom a lot of mean-spirited memes profess to despise, but I always accepted it when folks declined—and some did become my actual friend. I’m also very fond of the “warm acquaintance” relationship, at work or anywhere. These people are actually my greatest loss of working from home.

So yeah, I’m probably the oddball as far as working from home goes but mainly I spend the day alone with my work and my thoughts and some ill-behaved cats and I used to spend it in a building full of 100s of people who cared about the same kind of things I care about, a subsidized cafeteria, a fizzy water machine, climate control, and the world’s most flattering mirror, and you’ll never convince me that wasn’t better.