Well, how did I get here?
I think a lot about this question lately. I thought about it Saturday night after seeing a movie at the UWM Union. How time passes by and before we realize it, things have changed to the point of being unrecognizable. I had a sudden frisson as I stood in the mostly empty union. I remembered my dad taking me for the first time to the Union for an incoming freshman orientation. I saw students tapping away on laptops and smiled as I remembered a time when I was them. The Union didn't seem like such a neutral place then. It was a place that could be full of stress if I had to prepare for exams or finish that last paper of the semester.
The Union itself has changed dramatically after undergoing a renovation. I remember it as a dingy, dim-lit place to study and have some Taco Bell on Wednesdays before an afternoon class, to check my email on a primitive campus network. A place to wait for a while before class when I was a freshman and didn't want to deal with freeway driving. It all just reminds me of how many things are gone.
Take my workplace, for instance. I've been at Brookdale since 2006. After a merger, there were just over 600 communities and our department had under 30 associates. We worked on the third floor and were small enough to fit our department meetings in a small coffee bar space. We soon outgrew that and moved up to the fifth floor. In 2014 we would merge with Emeritus Senior Living and our department nearly doubled. Then, we began to right-size as underperforming or communities that seemed like outliers were divested. No one was laid off, but open positions weren't filled.
The death blow for life as we know it came with COVID-19. In March 2020 we were all sent home as the state stay-at-home orders took effect. People that I saw every day became squares in a Zoom meeting. Two other people on our team would regularly go on camera, others didn't bother. For me, this led to a more isolated feeling, as there were days I had no contact with my team.
Working from home was isolating, particularly the way I did it. At first, I occupied a table in our basement's playroom. The internet was sometimes spotty and the room was not heated. I tried to remedy this with a space heater, but it frequently blew a circuit, so I used it sparingly. After a while, I moved to the bar area, which was warmer but not ideal, given that little natural light shone through. As we were in isolation, Sarah tried to fill the calendar with virtual events with her moms group. There were frequent virtual dance parties that went on that shook the ceiling above me, but I didn't mind. The hardest adjustment (and one I never did figure out) was the lack of a commute. Without the drive to the office, I would come up the stairs and go from "work mode" to "dad mode" at warp speed.
I went back to the office in April 2021. Throughout the year at home, I fantasized about going back to a full office. I knew it wouldn't be on the fifth floor, as we had had to clear out our desks in late 2020, but I imagined the small talk, the return to "popping in" to my co-workers' cubes with a quick question or random thought. Only two of my colleagues were slated to return to the office: Steve, whose quick, sarcastic sense of humor I'd grown to find a comfort in and Brunetta, who could poke a hole in anything if given enough time. And only Steve wound up coming back, as Brunetta had a health issue. It turns out Steve didn't like being back to the office with the rest of what turned out to be a skeleton crew, so he wound up going home as well. I was disappointed but ultimately understood his decision.
Fast forward a bit to today. It's February of 2024. Brookdale has decided to move to another suite. I imagine paying an exorbitant rent for a mostly empty office made it an easy choice, but for those of us who like coming into an office every day, it's going to be like walking into a cold winter wind, one of those gusts where your face freezes a bit when you're outside shoveling. This isn't a small change either, no. It's basically like being told you can live in a palace to being told you can still live on the palace grounds, but in a room above the groundskeepers' garage. We had a lot of space to roam in our office; now it'll probably be a distraction every time someone exits or enters.
I'm in a very small minority. I like having a place other than home to work. I don't like looking at the walls of our house or look at the back yard all the time. I just get reminded of what needs to be done all the time and it makes me more anxious. Some people love being able to roll out of bed and start working. I just need that space every once in a while to get away. Corporations don't plan for the small minority. They know that nearly everyone in our office works from home, so having such a small office means cost savings. All I know is that it's the end of an era. The suite we are saying goodbye to was the one that welcomed me on the first day in 2006. Knowing that it'll no longer be a place I can go cements the dramatic change wrought by COVID. It's made me a bit blue this year seeing it come to this, but writing about it makes me feel at least a little better.
