‘Just me, alone in a room? It’s claustrophobic’
Anna Murphy
If you had asked me two years ago what I thought about working from home, my response would have been that I was entirely a fan. Long before WFH was reduced to initials, I was doing it for some of my week and I loved it. I write best in monastic silence. To conjure up stuff that someone else might actually want to read can be hard when the person two desks away is talking about their cat being sick.
But one of the many things that has been underlined to me by the whole Covid imbroglio is that working from home is desirable only when it is foregrounded by the fact that you are also NOT working from home at least some of the time. Yes, NWFH, that’s the initialism that makes my heart race at the moment. And that today returns the nation to a 30-second commute from bed to — if you are lucky — spare room fills me if not quite with dread, then certainly with drear.
To work from home day in, day out is at best boring, at worst depleting. It flattens out the landscape of life. It makes you worse at your job. And it impacts on the non-job stuff too. My response to the WFH aspect of plan B might best be summed up as WTAF.
A lot has been written, rightly, about the travails of those struggling to juggle an at-home office existence with family life, especially home schooling. Less often touched upon are those of us who live alone. There are some eight million of us. I like living on my own, so much so that I would happily never cohabit with anyone again. But, once more, I like it when it’s a game of two halves; when my solitude is offset by my forays out into the world. When it’s just me, myself and I, my room of my own becomes a tad claustrophobic.
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I totally understand that a five-day-a-week office gig can be onerous. I have done it. Yet for me the office is almost all upside. I get to see people I like who make me think and make me laugh. I get to drink better coffee than I do at home. I get to dissect Succession.
I also get to dress up, an act that, I would argue, is not only important to a fashion journalist like me, but to many more office workers than would care to admit it.
Office life is a performance. You have to bring it, as the kids say, which means cranking yourself up just a little bit every morning in terms of who you are and how you dress. What I realised during the lockdowns is that I really need that crank. And, equally, I really need the de-crank that comes afterwards. After a day working in the office I come home on the Tube and stop working. After a day writing at home it is all too easy for me accidentally to catch myself doing just a little bit more at 10pm.
Does the office suit some personalities better than others? Of course. But can it also help you to feel seen, to feel that your life is being borne witness to? Yes. Plus it makes you get out of your pyjamas before lunchtime. Then, when your work is done, you get to exit stage left and breaaattthhhe.
I also think there is something particular about the nature of community you find in a good office. (And I am well aware that there are plenty of bad ones.) This is the nearest you come in adulthood to the loose camaraderie of student life. Here are people who are not exactly friends, but not exactly not-friends. You may not know each other deeply, but as the months and years go by, you come to know each other well in a different way, a way that’s more superficial, sure, but that — precisely because of that superficiality — has an easy-breeziness about it that can be life-enhancing.
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In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000) the political scientist Robert D Putnam wrote about “bonding social capital” and “bridging social capital”, the former homogenous and exclusive — family being the prime example — the latter socially heterogeneous and inclusive. Bridging groups are vital, he argues, because of their fluidity and expansiveness. They provide you with acquaintances, with networks, which in turn might lead to a new job or a potential partner. Yet contemporary western culture, Putnam continues, is built more around bonding groups than bridging, and we are suffering as a result.
For me the office is the key bridging group. Even at 49, with my networks long in place, I need it. And my friends in their twenties and thirties — some of whom don’t even have space for a desk in their shared accommodation — need it far more.
A ping could mean Christmas alone
Charlie Gowans-Eglinton
I think I’ll miss the tea-point chats the most. Or perhaps when someone buys a packet of biscuits, specifically those milk chocolate wagon wheels from M&S. Oh, and the compliments on my outfit in the ladies’ loos — not to mention the need to wear an outfit.
It is with acute misery that I write this perched on the kitchen table. The 2:3 working week — two days at home, three in the office — was a happy compromise for most, better for balancing childcare and not spending a bomb on flaccid sandwiches. I work from home even more than that, but whenever I fancied a bit more bustle and a day off from paying for my own central heating, I could go on a mini-break to the office. No more. Now most of us will be working from home for the forseeable: no colleagues, no chatter, no reason to leave the house at all (although you can go to your office Christmas party, of course — just not the office — based on strong scientific reasoning).
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And what’s next? There’s no official plan C. Yet. But this government’s handling of the pandemic has turned me from glass half-full to glass in-shards-underfoot. The natural next steps would be self-isolation if you’ve come into contact with any strain of Covid, not just Omicron. Then: limiting the number of households that can mix.
After months of caution, of wearing my mask just in case, of avoiding busy public transport and skipping parties, I had thought it would all be worth it when I celebrated Christmas with my family. And now, at the very last minute, there has been another balls-up, and plan B might be too little, too late.
I live alone, so if I am pinged by Track and Trace in the next few days I could spend ten days — including Christmas — in complete isolation. There are thousands like me, living alone, or in house shares with strangers, or as single parents with children. Without a ping, but with households limited, at least I’d be allowed to see my mum and dad on Christmas Day, assuming we’re allowed support bubbles for singles again.
Perhaps I should isolate myself completely in the meantime to guarantee my Christmas Day. But how long can anyone sustain this lonely way of life? Boris Johnson and co haven’t managed to follow any of the rules they’ve written, so just how much will be asked of those of us to whom the rules actually apply? There’s a fine line between being cautious and going out of my tree, and at the moment I’m some way over onto the “tree” side.
I cancelled one lunch last week — too many people — and another was cancelled on me, just in case a friend’s cold turned into something worse. If a friend hadn’t dropped in unexpectedly midweek, I would’ve gone five days without speaking to another person in real life. And, no, Zoom really isn’t the same. If it were, then No 10 would have cancelled all those Christmas parties in favour of one Zoom pub quiz last year. Just like the rest of us.
If I’m lucky, the postman knocks
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Jenny Coad
I should really make more of an effort to chat before my hospital doctor husband, Rob, leaves at 7am. It’s likely to be the last conversation I have in real life before he returns at 7pm or 8pm. Sometimes I might be lucky and the cheery, shorts-for-all-seasons postman will knock with a parcel. Joy! Because you know how London is — we don’t really do greetings in the streets.
It is strange to spend so much time on my own when I’m used to the chatter of colleagues, the hum of the office. I keep the radio on for company. In the previous protracted lockdown I spoke to my fellow home-alone teammate on the phone daily, at length. We kept each other going from our respective two-bedroom flats.
I came to rely on my upstairs neighbours, also squirrelled away at their living-room computers. One of them rescued me from being followed home from a lunchtime trip to Sainsbury’s (you have to try to keep things interesting). It was the week Sarah Everard had gone missing. I could not shake the man no matter how I altered my route, taking this street, then that, so he wouldn’t find out which was my door. Luckily for me, my gallant neighbour answered my call, came to meet me and the man promptly went away. It was a gorgeously sunny day and I was furious at how vulnerable I had been made to feel in my own neighbourhood. I double-locked the door that afternoon and had to make myself go out the next day.
It would never have happened around my office in the middle of frenetic London Bridge. Normally, at lunch, I’d be out on a river walk with a colleague or in the mêlée at Borough Market buying an overpriced bowl of pasta (no wonder working from home saves us all so much money).
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In the office, when it gets dark, I can watch the sun set dramatically over the city. While at home I jump at a brusque knock from an unexpected delivery and dread an evening call from the ex-prisoner selling cleaning products. It’s tempting not to open the door at all.
And that’s part of the problem. The more you stay cossetted in your orbit, the more of an effort it is to leave it and perform the tasks you’d normally slot into a working day: picking up milk, popping into the post office, meeting friends in the evening.
The drudgery of domesticity takes the place of “water-cooler moments”. Emptying the dishwasher is the new coffee break; hanging out the washing replaces a quick gossip. In the spring I deadheaded roses for a leg stretch, but there’s not much to clip in our “yarden” now.
I miss getting dressed properly and seeing what my counterparts on the fashion desk are wearing. I haven’t sunk as low as an al-desko dressing gown, but hoodies, big cardigans, leggings and Ugg boots — these make up my WFH uniform. You don’t appreciate ambient, draught-free office heating until you’re in a badly insulated Victorian flat all day. Then you catch yourself on Zoom and realise how uplifting blusher, a crisply ironed shirt or a big pair of earrings can be.
I lament the sense of feeling like a Londoner too. The area I live in is lovely and leafy, but it can’t live up to St Paul’s and the Globe, both of which I pass on my commute along the Thames. Let’s hope that Omicron doesn’t keep us at home for long.
It soon turns into LAW: living at work
Robbie Millen
Never again! I will never work from home again! If my bosses at Times HQ barricade the offices to keep me out, like a reverse Houdini I will find a way in. To misquote Charlton Heston, they will have to take my office chair and desk pencil cup from “my cold, dead hands”.
Working from home during the first lockdown was profoundly dispiriting. Even the good things, such as the daily constitutional around the local park, quickly palled — have you seen a coot murder taking place? I remember with horror watching one coot peck and drown another, a slow-motion slaying. The next day we saw the coot corpse floating in the lake like a shapeless umbrella . . .
Actually, “working from home” is a nonsense phrase; WFH is the wrong abbreviation. In truth it should be LAW — living at work. Your private spaces become the office, a backdrop to Zoom meetings, scrutinised and judged by your eagle-eyed colleagues. Work becomes life, and life becomes work. For me, they bled into each other so that I was constantly, neurotically and pointlessly checking emails and Slack (a forum that weaponises time-wasting) from first thing to bedtime, seven days a week.
The ritual of the 8pm home-time gin and tonic, the signal that work was over and emails could wait for tomorrow, disappeared. Instead, I sent pointless emails at antisocial hours to prove to myself that I wasn’t slacking, which were in turn neurotically read by anxious colleagues doing the same.
Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen, the authors of Out of Office, a new polemic against WFH, argue that “the dark truth of remote work” is “it promises to liberate workers from the chains of the office, but in practice it capitalises on the total collapse of work-life balance”.
Beavering away alone, I felt I was becoming dissociated from the work itself. What was the link between my pecking away at my laptop and the book review section that actually appeared in the newspaper and on the website every week. The connection began to feel unreal. Was what I was doing good or bad? I couldn’t tell without the immediate feedback of the colleague sitting next to me. I found an unnerving, debilitating sense of futility creeping in.
Returning to the office, with its rituals and daily rhythms and its camaraderie, re-energised me. I needed the inconsequential chitchat and the gossip, the serendipitous remarks that spark ideas, and the shared jokes, the coffee rounds and water-cooler recommendations. Essentially, I discovered in lockdown that I wasn’t the misanthrope I thought I was. I actually like other flesh-and-blood people. My colleagues are interesting, opinionated, smart people — who wouldn’t want to spend time with them?
I don’t agree! You won’t catch me in the office
Hattie Crisell
I sympathise when others bemoan the work-from-home order, but the truth is it suits me well. I have no children, so I sleep until I wake naturally and do the commute from my bed to the living room at 9am, with nobody around to judge me on my timekeeping or my attire. If I showed up at the Times office looking the way I appear at my desk now — still sweaty and creased with sleep, and wearing roomy Jim Royle jeans that I’ve accidentally tucked into my socks — I’d be sent home on compassionate leave with a psychiatric check-up in the diary. Standards have slipped around here during the pandemic and I don’t feel inclined to pick them up again.
On busy days I get more done at home than I ever have with colleagues around me; you can’t expect me to concentrate when someone sitting three desks away has a look on their face that suggests gossip. On quiet days I do a Pilates class or have a bath at 2pm with a book. Don’t roll your eyes like that — in my business reading counts as working. And at lunchtime I make elaborate meals. I certainly eat better at home than in the office: no slimy sandwiches and no underwhelming chocolate muffins bought in desperation at 4pm.
Yes, sometimes I miss being surrounded by a team, but more frequently my problem is too much chatting. I have to keep my phone on “do not disturb” mode because friends and family who are part-time or retired often imagine that I can do a leisurely catch-up at 11am on a Tuesday. Then again, it’s an understandable mistake because sometimes I can.
Working from home can be a slightly rudderless existence, and yes, perhaps it is time to get some new jeans and start brushing my teeth before noon again. I’d ask my boss her opinion, but she’s already clocked off early.