In a few months time I will have hit my 20th year in the workforce. I’m not sure how to celebrate two decades of doing tasks people have told me to do instead of having a little lie down. Some sort of LinkedIn post seems apt. The platform that gives sucking up a social media centre-stage to perform.
You know the posts. The ones about what missing the birth of their first child to attend a meeting taught them about b2b sales. Or those fake morning routine posts about people getting up at 4am to clear their heads in an ice bath to “prepare for battle” before heading out at 5am “to beat competitors”. Their language suggests they are sell-sword mercenaries heading into combat. Their job title says they work in marketing. It is confusing.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned it is that work is all about embracing confusion. Overcomplicated processes. Phrases that mean nothing. We are pivoting, we are boiling the ocean, we are touching base. New policies that take 30 pages to explain what three words could manage. Four if you add the term please at the end. Just don’t say that out loud.
Employers hate when staff point out things that don’t make sense. They encourage feedback but only if it’s positive. In the same way I only ask if what I’m wearing to a wedding is okay while I’m in the car en route to the church.
This is how the banal evil that is hot-desking took power. If you had asked employees if they wanted to spend eight hours a day touching the same mouse and keyboard of their colleague who doesn’t wash their hands when they use the toilet, they would have said no. Loudly. But push terms like “agile” and “flexible” in front of the sexier moniker of “hot-desking” and it’s suddenly a good idea.
I was hopeful Covid-19 would have ended the cruel practice, given it’s not ideal to share surfaces during a pandemic. But since working from home it came back with a vengeance. Employers realised they didn’t have to pay for larger office spaces if employees were staggering their attendance. So it’s back to the racing in and finding the one good monitor before someone else nabs it.
There’s something so undignified about schlepping all your chargers, your lip balm and your water bottle back to a locker at the end of the day. Something cruel and impersonal about a “clear desk policy”. I yearn for the return to the traditional office. I dream of a desk with walls. Beige and carpeted.
Cubicles were mocked for being like small prisons. Little boxes representing the confinement workers found themselves in. But they gave us more freedom than open offices allow. They gave us a modicum of privacy. They let us have a therapeutic eyeroll while on a conference call without the threat of unemployment.
We could decorate them with things that were important to us. Photos of our family. Postcards. Cathay comics. And in my case, letters from irate readers telling me I’m a disgrace to journalism and they would never read the paper again. Until they sent me another letter about my next article, confirming the opposite. Cubicles let us be people. Not wipe-clean worker drones.
They offered sonic protection from our desk mates’ loud phone calls. Their habit of snorting snot up their nose instead of just getting a goddam tissue and blowing. Their preference of scraping the bottom of a bowl of tuna as loudly as possible with a fork until every stinking morsel is gone.
Now our desks are conjoined and we have nowhere to hide. Dentists are overjoyed. With so many teeth set permanently on edge or grating from being so exposed to the annoyance that is other people, they must be raking it in. They’ve taken our walls, they’ve taken our permanent desks. Where does it end?
In fairness, I now have a permanent desk. With small dividers. My happiness and productivity have increased tenfold. The secret to success is not getting up at 5am. Instead, it’s having a little chest of drawers with wheels that slides under the desk that holds hand cream, paracetamol and dry shampoo.
As I’m out on the road most of the time, my handbag now serves as my office, with broken chargers and crumpled receipts forming a magma-like crust at the bottom.
I am lucky enough to have spent the majority of the last 20 years doing something I love and getting paid for it. Even if it cuts into time spent dedicated to my ultimate passion – being left alone and eating biscuits.