Early & Alone #69: Remote Work

On missing the office, sometimes

Photo by CoWomen on Unsplash

Over coffee with a friend this weekend, I realized that I’ve been working from home since January 2019. That’s almost FOUR years. Absolutely wild! Prior to that, I’d worked full-time in 9-5 office environments for about 13 years. While I understood the appeal of working from home back in the office days (no commute! pants optional! access to better snacks!), I didn’t personally aspire to that lifestyle. No, I thrived on the social environment of the office. I loved chatting in the office kitchen or having cake for someone’s birthday. I was the person who organized happy hours and CD swaps and book swaps. But somewhere along the way, that all changed, and even the social aspects of work were draining. By the time I got laid off at the start of 2019, I was ready to leave the corporate office behind. And I have—my work since then has been fully remote and will continue to be as long as I’m with my current company. Lately, as more and more friends are returning to the office, I’m left to reflect on what working remotely has meant for me, personally and professionally.

Earlier this summer, Emma Goldberg published an article in the New York Times called “The Magic of Your First Work Friends.” I didn’t expect to tear up while reading it, but I did. Goldberg’s reporting of experiences working in publishing in New York in the 1990s doesn’t align exactly to my experiences working in textbook publishing in Boston and then New York in the 2000s, but a lot of it did resonate with me.

There’s an electricity to forming that first close friend at work. It’s the thrill of staying too late at drinks to keep giggling. It’s the delight of darting to someone’s desk and dragging her to the bathroom to gossip. It’s the tenderness of showing up to work on a rough morning and realizing a co-worker will know instantly that something is wrong.

My first official full-time publishing job was located in a giant brick building in Boston’s Fort Point neighborhood, back when it was still just mostly parking lots and the ICA. I worked in a cubicle in a dim corner but at lunch time, everyone would drift over to “The Oasis,” a large open space with long tables and couches under skylights. The best part about that space was the conglomeration of people you’d end up eating lunch with. Not everyone was friends, or even friendly, but the Oasis was communal, so making the choice to eat there was making the choice to be open to conversation. I made some of my closest friends in those years in that space, some of whom I’m still friends with today. Later, our company would move to a bigger building in the same neighborhood and it was never quite the same. There was an official cafeteria, with a lunch cart and microwaves, but the round tables were small and exclusive, and every department would eat there, making it loud and crowded and chaotic. A small group of colleagues and I would often find an empty conference room and close the door while we ate. More fun for gossip, but definitely less space for random connections and new people.

I went on to have other jobs in other offices, making other friends, most of whom remain close friends years later. When I went to Sedona and the Grand Canyon last fall, I traveled with a group of three women, all of whom I’d met in various offices over the years. The relationships we form with our colleagues are different from other friendships. For one, we tend to spend a great deal of time with our coworkers—we see them more than we see most other people in our lives, for better or for worse. Also, working together is a kind of trauma bonding. No matter how much you may love your job, there are always problems that come up, and no one understands those unique problems as well as your coworkers.

Working remotely just isn’t the same. Though I have been working with the same company in some capacity for two and a half years, I have never met any of my colleagues, except the friend who recommended me for the job in the first place, whom I knew from having crossed paths at several different offices (listen, the academic publishing world is real small and we all know one another). Though I care for my colleagues, I don’t know very much about their lives (no coffeemaker to gather around for morning small talk, no happy hour drinks to vent over) and they don’t know much about mine.

To be fair, I think this is something that tends to happen even in in-person work situations as we get older. In my last in-person job, the one I got laid off from back in 2019, I was working in the same building I’d once worked at as an assistant, but I was a manager, working with teams in other parts of the country, sitting in my office on Zoom before anyone else really knew what Zoom was. The colleagues I had who were my age had trains to catch after work, children to pick up from school. There were happy hours, but most of them were official and stilted, sapped of that energy and connection that comes from early work friendships.

So I accept that these relationships change as we get older, as do most of our relationships. But what makes me sad are the vast numbers of people in their 20s who are just starting out, working their first professional jobs, likely just sitting alone in front of a computer every day. No Oasis, no cafeteria, no happy hours, no random tray of muffins to congregate around. No opportunities to forge life-long friendships in the crucible of the cubicle. For all of the downsides of working in an office, there are the connections, and I can’t imagine my life without the ones I was fortunate to have.

Bright Spots

• I didn’t think I needed a stressful show about an Italian beef joint in Chicago but I did. The Bear is just as good as everyone says it is, especially if you love food and restaurants. Yes, chef.

• Trigger warning: This article in Outside about mothering disabled lambs punched me right in the guts. If you’re not in the space to read about infertility, skip this one.

• This podcast interview about friendship with psychologist Dr. Marisa Franco was SO insightful. And now I want to read her book!

• Speaking of podcasts, a friend (and former colleague!!) recommended this podcast (60 Songs That Explain the 90s) to me ages ago but I never listened bc it’s on Spotify and to me, Spotify = music. But I happened to click on it when I was in the car over the weekend and now I want to listen to all the episodes. I got so sucked into this examination of the Cranberries via the Smiths and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

• I was in New York a couple of weekends ago and visited a couple of old favorites that I haven’t visited in years and it made me happy and sad all at once, but mostly it made me full.