A Brief Return To The Office

Yesterday I had to go back into the office. 

It was my turn to convert over from our current mail system to the Macrohard system.  I had been putting this off - first because I really did not want to go into the office and then because of a mandated 14 day quarantine period, but technology, it seems, finally caught up with me.

The building I went to at first was the original building that we moved to in 2016, three months or so after I had started with The Company.  As I like to tell the story, there was 31,000 square feet and only 16 of us.  The idea of filling the space up at that time was ridiculous at best.

Fast forward almost 4 years.  The space is completely built out and filled out - in fact, over filled out to the point that we are moving to "open offices" and "hot desking" to accommodate the overflow. 

When I arrived - mind you, this is with only essential staff on site- I walked up to a group holding an outside meeting and realized that I recognized only one of them.  Moving through the facility, I stopped and said hello to folks that I knew, but realized that about 60% of them I did not know. 

The facility was changed as well, 2/3's of the way through the final build out.  I recognized the layout - good heavens, I was involved in the planning and the communication - but to see it was to realize that the building I knew and had worked in for 3.5 years was largely gone.

I then had to go off to the other site, about half a mile down the road.  Here, the building was not different but empty.  Eerily empty.  We rent 50,000 square feet in perhaps a 500,000 square foot building - and there were maybe a dozen of us in there total, including employees, security, and cleaning staff.  The escalators were on, the lights were burning, the air conditioning was keeping us at a temperate 78 F, the flat screens in the lunch rooms were showing videos of home improvement  to empty tables and chairs which, no doubt, had been sanitized sometime during the day.

My office, which I had not been in since the end of March, was stripped of the personal items I took with me leaving only the skeletal framework of computer screens and a docking station looking out over the tops of oak trees and parking lots for an office I officially had less than one month.   All of the items I saw in March that I had to get down were still up on the big whiteboard, waiting to be removed.  I looked.  Most of them had been completed.

I erased everything and left the key on the Office Manager's Desk. 

(Although no-one has yet said it, after A Sort of Hamerfall the office is no longer mine.  It is just easier sometimes to do a thing rather that inconveniencing individuals and setting up embarrassing conversations that can easily be avoided.)

The migration took longer than expected - do they not always? - which gave me plenty of time to think as I worked between teleconferences.  I had hours to sit in my old office - I was not supposed to access e-mail so my ability to do work was limited - and just think.

I realized how changed the company is.  And how isolated I felt.

It was six months, almost to the day, since my change in positions was decided, five months since I started working from home, three months since I transitioned into my new job.  And seemingly, the world - at least my work world - has changed dramatically in that time.

I feel strangely saddened.

I cannot really put my finger on the reason why.  Part of it, perhaps, is simply that the people that I knew and associated and worked with are becoming fewer and fewer, diluted into an onrush of newcomers or simply disappearing from The Company down the HR Memory Hole.  Part of it is that the structures and processes that I knew - in some cases put in place - are slowly being abandoned or transformed - all natural of course with arrival of my replacement and new management, but noticeable.  And perhaps part of it (if I admit to my own vanity) is that I, too, am slipping out of memory and mind, becoming only a ghost in the machine, a sage of a particular place and time who may, occasionally, have information of some value.  At one time I was one in seventeen.  Now, I am one in over two hundred.

When I left, it was with the realization that it was quite likely I would not be in again before the beginning of 2021 and perhaps some time after that.  And that with that amount of time, the changes that I saw were going to become even more pronounced, more noticeable.

There was a time when I saw myself associated with where I work for years and years.  Now, perhaps not so much - not from anything I have done or they have done, but rather that the company I started at and helped shape is gone and the corporation has arrived.

Finally, even ghosts in the machine disappear.