You are here (but don’t want to be).

This is where you don't want to be.

As more people are being asked to return to offices it’s as though we have to remind people that working from an office was something we all did, all the time. We did it so much that we forgot that it wasn’t normal to be sitting at a desk all day. How the pendulum has swung. Nowadays if people are asked to go to the office, you can measure the collective groan from space. The collective sigh would affect the weather. I get it. I’m one of the moaners and my sighs are heavy, accompanied by eye rolls of disbelief.

How did it get this way? For years I worked in an office because well, that’s where the work was. Even when I was designing signage for trails and spent days on my bike to better understand the landscape (or just scoff off while riding trails in Gatineau Park) I still returned to the office to mark where I’d been and what I’d seen. When I started working freelance from home, I found myself going cabin crazy and would routinely run around the house meowing at the top of my lungs while jumping off the walls. Though that may have been the cat? The sentiment was the same. We were cell mates in a prison of our own making.

When I did start working for someone else again, I enjoyed the office and the camaraderie. We had just moved to Toronto and I didn’t know many people so it gave me a world of meeting people of my ilk. At some point though, doing digital work, it became possible to do it in the office or at home as long as you had a good internet connection and a desk you were fine. Yet that more often than not led to bringing work home when you really shouldn’t. The seeping of work into home life had begun.

The next time I freelanced I enjoyed the benefits of sleeping in, the freedom of getting chores done when convenient and popping out for coffee just to get out of the house. I didn’t make much money but admittedly my creativity was at an all-time high. I did great work that led again to an office job.

By this time around it was very easy to grab your laptop and work from home if you had a doctor’s appointment or if you were a bit under the weather. Even before the pandemic, I had a mirrored setup at home and at the office. Because I biked to work, in poor weather I would just stay home. As long as you let your workmates know where you were it was fine.

When the work-from-home order came, so many of us were used to it, our company didn’t lose a step. In fact, hearing other people complain about it sounded funny. My direct team were all comfortable not just working from home but being really productive. Almost every meeting involved people in four time zones. If you had an early meeting, you rolled out of bed and were there. If you had a late meeting you rolled into bed immediately after. To be honest, that didn’t happen too much to us in Toronto because our time zone put us in a perfect spot to talk to California, Europe and India all within our regular work day. Working from 10AM to 6PM was common and comfortable.

For me, the first six months of the pandemic were a health nightmare. My eczema and hives were so bad I didn’t dare leave the house and sleepless nights meant I could grab cat naps whenever I could during the day. Working from home meant that I could actually work. It gave me the flexibility to get to treatments, avoid any commute time and more importantly work in clothes unfit for the office.

Yet hearing how much the pandemic and its isolating effects had on people I am starting to feel like there are some among us who are whiny little turds who need to put their grownup pants on and get back to work or at the very least to stop whinging on about how hard it is to wear pants. I’m sure there are many people who have and are currently struggling with their mental health due to what we went through. Certainly, no one would question just how difficult it must have been to work as a front-line caregiver over the last few years. But there are also many people who are being whiny little turds and their use of the same language as those who are genuinely suffering only exacerbates the problem. I only hope we find some kind of litmus test you can pee on to distinguish the truly impacted from the whiny little turds, and soon.