Back to work in the apocalypse
In which we go to back to office and it's End Days
My in-person work week started off with snow on the ground in June here on the Jersey Shore and ended in a thick cloud of smoke.
Tuesday marked the first day of my company’s official “Return to Office” policy. If you live within a certain distance of our various offices, leaders expected you to show up this week in actual shoes and bras and act like people who remembered how to work with other people IRL, every Tuesday and Wednesday.
Despite going into the office once a week/month/quarter for the last 2+ years, Tuesday felt different for me. Many of us joked throughout the day that it felt like the first day of the new school year. Every time I went to the ladies’ room on the other side of the office I ended up stopping and chatting with folks so that by the time I returned to my desk I needed to go again.
My son who’s home from college even took my picture, all dressed up in new grown-up lady work duds, that he shared with his siblings in our group text with the caption, “Mom’s first day of school!”
As if things weren’t already weird putting on real pants for work and not my trusty Old Navy joggers, I noticed snow piled up on the curb and blanketing nearby trees as I approached the entrance to my office building.
I work in an old Bell Labs building in Holmdel, NJ, that’s been reimagined as a more modern work/play space in an iconic building, which was designed by some fancy architect, and I have heard that if you tipped it up off the ground it's as tall as the Empire State Building. The “metro burb” as its website describes it, includes four levels of offices with a soaring atrium in the middle and tenants as varied as a Mexican place, escape room, Montessori and a Bar Method. A veritable smorgasbord of uses.
The building is also the backdrop for some of the scenes for the AppleTV show Severance and I’ve heard coworkers talk about seeing cast members run around for a few weeks at a time during filming. And apparently, this week they were back to shoot some scene(s) that required a whole lot of people needed to blow actual snow from a big truck on top of the stuff made out of foam already on the ground.
Being greeted by that surreal landscape just added to the buzz as we all made our way to the office that first morning. Some of us hugged and complimented each other’s outfits and despite having work I actually needed to produce that day, we all mostly chitchatted on and off all day.
It was weird to go back the next day — two days in a row — but once again I put on real clothes but headed in a little late so that I could finish writing something without the distraction of office activity. The snow was still there when I arrived and I took a picture of it with the building and blue almost-summer sky in the background as workers started shoveling the faux snow off the ground.
BellWorks is a bit of a concrete vault and as my desk is set back from the large windows across the office, I never noticed that the sky had gotten weird. Later in the afternoon, I started getting alerts on my phone about the smoke from the Canadian wildfires blanketing the East Coast and a bunch of us went to look out the windows overlooking a usually bucolic setting and take pictures.
Being cocooned in all that steel and concrete helped give the illusion that it was all pretty remote until the alarms went off throughout the building late in the day and we were evacuated. That was very weird and scary as the automated voice that came on announced that a fire had been detected in the building and when we emerged from the stairwell on the main floor, were greeted by a thick smell of fire and a haze of smoke filling the atrium.
Folks congregated near the steps where remnants of the fake snow got stuck to the bottoms of our shoes as we all talked about what to do. On my way out, I had to stop at a public ladies' room on the main floor because my bladder does not wait for disaster to abate. She needs attention no matter what. As I was washing my hands, a man’s voice came over the building’s sound system to say that it had been a false alarm and we could return to the building.
But for me, it was too late. I had already packed up my bag to finish up the work week at home and didn’t feel like schlepping it back up again. I went home and changed out of my “real” clothes and on a Zoom call the next morning, I laughed to myself when I saw that all of us were in sweatshirts and hair pulled in ponytails or piled on top of our heads. It was like we gave it our all for two days to look like professional people looked in the Before Times, and were going back to the Covid way of doing business.
Here is what I really want to say, that despite the evacuation and the mediocre $15 Korean chicken bowl lunch, and having to wear an underwire bra two days in a row, I loved being in the office. And I know that is a wildly unpopular statement with some of my coworkers, but we are all on our own journey.
On a personal level, toiling alone, day after day, for 2+ years kinda stunk. I felt very isolated at times and didn’t really realize until I went away to our conference in early May just how much I thrived on being around other people. How much I need to connect in person both personally and professionally. I spend a giant chunk of my life working with these people and it's awkward and inauthentic if we can only connect from the shoulders up on our laptop screens.
And professionally, it’s really nice to scoot my chair over to a teammate and ask a quick question instead of having to wait 20 minutes for them to answer me on Teams.
And also, there is something to be said for getting dressed to leave the house twice a week and not wearing the exact same thing on Saturday that I’d wear for a day of remote work on Tuesday. It’s also a great excuse to buy things.
Finally, I will say that for me, it’s like the best of both worlds. I get to see people I really like twice a week and then retreat to my home office the rest of the time. That’s a pretty perfect hybrid situation. If I had children of any age still at home, I think I’d feel a lot different but this empty nester just has a dog to worry about. It's quite luxurious, really. I feel really lucky that this is where I've landed.
It's also a far cry from where I was not long ago. Struggling to find purpose. And a steady income. Sitting on my couch day after day, slightly hungover, with a pending empty nest and not sure what to do about any of it. How would I ever figure out how to get unstuck?
So, life is weird, guys! And great. And often, unpredictable. That's what I tried to tell my teammates this week who aren't so sure about this back-to-office thing. "Just let the Universe take you where it wants to take you," I told them (probably sounding a lot like their own moms). Who knows where that will be? We just need to show up — again, and again, and again — to see what happens next. And hopefully, we'll all be in cute clothes and ready for it.
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SUNDAY SHARES: Read, watch, cook, buy
The best kind of mashups: When the holiday season rolls around (which in retail is early September), I load up on BBW candles in all my favorite cozy flavors. I burn them all winter long but when spring comes, those scents don’t seem right and yet, I don’t love anything geared toward a warmer weather vibe setting. Too perfumy for me. So I almost fainted right on the ground of the BBW at the Jersey Shore Outlets last Saturday when I spotted these mashups of my two FAVORITE scents + fruity seasonal flavors. Also, that hint of the holidays helps justify my commitment to long sleeves and pants all year long (I heard you,readers, loud and clear on the subject of shorts for women 50+ in the last newsletter).
Okay, I lied: There is on occasion, just the right outfit that I’m willing to bear calves and forearms to wear. This black shirtdress from Old Navy is quite chic and in a crisp cotton that belies its more humble origins. I could have gotten a small but the medium gives it that more slouchy, oversized vibe that feels a little more modern. It goes down to my knees and the sleeves swallow that whole upper arm situation so it’s just my forearms exposed. I also bought it in white because when I like something, I really like it. Oh, plus, it has pockets.
First day of school trousers: I got many compliments this week at work on these trousers from The Gap that I bought in navy. The fabric is kind of a drapey linen with wide legs cropped a little short and higher waist. I bought them in petite thinking that would give me the shorter length I want but the waist is a bit snug (which I don’t want). But I’ve worn twice for full days of working and they felt fine.
First day of school crinkle blouse: I went to the outlets last weekend ostensibly to buy my 20yo some decent looking clothes so he’s not always wearing tshirts he bought himself at Goodwill. Seriously. But while at the JCrew Factory, I picked up a few things for work and this crinkly linen blouse in pink was a keeper. Not too thin and the small is just loose enough. Plus, I never buy colors so this was a good addition to the sea of neutral hanging in my closet.
Emergency bedding: I didn’t even mention that on top of the snow and evacuation this week, I also had a college friend come and stay for the night. It was last minute, which was probably a blessing or I would have been renovating my house in preparation of her arrival. As it was, all I had time to do was buy all new bedding for my guest bed. What was there I had reused from the old house and it was in need of a refresh that I had been holding off until I had a reason to pull the trigger. I pretty much replicated what’s on my own bed. I got the Target Organic sheets, Parachute duvet cover and Costco insert. When she slid in that night and asked where I got the sheets, I gave myself an internal pat on the back.
Love me a narcissist: My college pal left a small tub of product from a new-to-me company she’s doing some consulting for and I am in love with its weird smell and texture. The company is Buff City Soap (anyone know it?) and the one I have is the body butter in the Narcissist scent, which is thick and you kind of have to work on your skin but as it melts it is a little oily (in a good way) and I found myself smelling my arm throughout the day. I just discovered that they make a full complement of laundry products in that Narcissist fragrance and am ordering tout de suite because why have a little Narcissist when you can double down and get a lot?
Weekly PSA: I am sorry but if any of you who are local to The Blonde Shallot in Little Silver (NJ) haven’t hung up your aprons to let Jess Rogers serve as the official cook of your house this summer, you are doing yourself dirty. This week alone, my son and I inhaled her new LAX salad, taquitos with her homemade to-die-for guac and buffalo chicken bites with her stupid-good ranch dressing. And don’t even get me going on her Mom’s Tomato Salad my family likes to dip ripped-off pieces of the Benchmark sourdough bread she sells into the tomato juice. Also, I am considering launching a Go-Fund-Me to finance The Blonde Shallot opening an outpost in BellWorks so I have guaranteed good food for lunch when I’m in the office twice a week because the food that’s there is meh.
Friends don’t let friends eat each other: Since we last spoke, I have become absolutely obsessed with the series Yellowjackets and binged all two seasons over the course of two weeks. It’s about a NJ high school girls soccer team in the 1990s whose plane crashed in an as yet disclosed remote wilderness where they are stranded for 19 months and bad things happen. The story flips back and forth between then and now and the survivors’ lives are messed up and intertwined. Would I tell everyone to watch this? No. But my two daughters were watching and while I was nervous about what I sort of knew about the show, plunged in and found myself thinking about the girls during the day and excited to get back on the couch and watch another episode each night. Disturbing as hell and yet, great storytelling.
A good story for when TV is not an option: I also binged the audio version of the recently-published novel Pineapple Street while walking the dog and driving around doing errands. Loved. A modern day look at class and family dynamics set in the fruit section of Brooklyn Heights. Loved the narration and how the snooty mother — who loves tennis and finding just the right theme for every gathering — sounds like her jaw has been wired shut. Delightful.
xoAmy
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