Scott: Working from home is so overrated

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Like millions of Americans, I work at home.

This condition of work in situ, adopted just five years ago as a temporary measure to survive quarantine during a pandemic, has suddenly taken on new urgency.

Once merely a scramble to keep people employed, a right to working remotely has become something of rallying cry for the post-industrial workplace.

This, the purported right to communicate with colleagues through digital means only — this right of continued quarantining in the absence of a pandemic, if you will — is increasingly imbued with hallowed status.

Typing in one’s pajamas has become a sort of red line in our conversations about employment rights.

And yet the necessity of working in proximity to other humans — of entering the commons to get paid — has been a basic condition of society for millennia.

So it’s been striking, the speed with which these arguments have been taken up without much in the way of reflection about why people gather.

So much so that it’s easy to wonder if we’ve lost touch with some things about life.

Me, every morning I get dressed, say goodbye to my people, watch with envy as they scurry off into the weather, then do some dishes, walk a dog, play a piano, and try to resist whatever distractions catch my eye.

Some days, I even get in the car and go on a directionless “commute” around town, just to orient myself to the condition of other people working.

Procrastinations exhausted, I eventually sit down at a small desk in my living room, turn on my computer, and try to maintain my productivity and faith in my fellow man as I stare at a screen in silence.

It isn’t easy. My eye keeps catching sight of those luckier souls traveling down the busy road outside my window.

Persons gainfully needed at work sites filled with bags, boots, umbrellas, laughter and faces.

I am, I believe, fundamentally unallied with the logic of my dual condition — my status as a person both in a house and at his job.

As a result, I get up from my desk whenever the dog spots a delivery man, the wind knocks over the bird feeders or my eye wanders to the smallest chore drawing my eye.

But I always go back.

Years can evaporate in this half-condition, my purgatory of work-at-home sleepwalking.

My closet is filled with threads I can’t find cause to wear. I rarely see people I care about. I don’t hear of anything happening in my town and when I bump into friends, all I can think is, when did everyone get so old?

Should my beloved wife or son come home during the day, I sometimes fail to turn around and say hello.

By then, the interruption has invariably become timed for a long-denied bout of focus. I hope they understand I am just a guy in his office with no door, as opposed to a dad or husband being a jerk.

I have no illusions about the office. I worked in them for years. I fought my way through the sidewalks of Minneapolis and Manhattan, racing into glass towers, low-slung dives, office parks and Gilded Age buildings.

I felt the claustrophobia of cubicles, cursed the company printers, and flowed onto sidewalks at 5:30 with a thirst that only quitting time can give a person.

But during the depths of the pandemic, when we were all sent home to these creepy monitor cams and dazed colleagues atop backgrounds pixelated into ectoplasm, we all knew remote work sucked.

Gone were the commiserations over a coffeemaker about some new initiative, the Vikings or the devastating conditions of the supply cabinet.

Gone was the light tap on a colleague’s door to try out an idea. Gone were the relationships linking people from differing departments, pay grades, ZIP codes and educational backgrounds.

In their place, we got the work-at-home normal, with an accompanying souring of our mood and political condition.

We got the ascension of IT over every other role in the enterprise. The need for constant juggling of text, email and the impenetrable utilization logic of message boards like Slack.

The misunderstandings!

The snubs that arise from the wrong emoji, indifference to punctuation or a misplaced comma. From failing to insert an exclamation point and thereby giving someone the finger.

We got people on their couches, at kitchen tables, below teetering piles of plastic tubs while surreptitiously watching TV. The same people invading our “calendars” to schedule more Zoom sessions of same.

So it has been notable, these howls ringing forth over news that state office workers are to report to a shared place of activity for half their allotted days.

I am aware that everyone’s different, that people need the flexibility to peel away during the day to tend to sick relatives, and that some people just want to never leave their house all day in order to make a living.

Some of the more technocratic defenders of work at home have pulled out their calculators and determined that, like death, working at home places fewer people on the roads, using less gas, causing less climate change.

They tell us the old office towers should all become apartments. The past five years have canceled out every lesson of human nature learned during the previous 5,000.

In a recent column, Jennifer Brooks said the move would require workers to “pay for child care, shell out for a new wardrobe … hope nobody veers deliberately through a puddle to soak you in the bike lane on your way to the office.”

I don’t know — finding someone to watch your kid while you work, purchasing clothes to demonstrate your participation in the social contract, encountering other humans in ways that are not super-duper …

That sounds like life.

A life some of us miss.

Paul John Scott lives in Rochester.