Do you remember mid-March when office workers were sent home? I sure do. As a small-business owner, that’s exactly what I did: Sent my folks home to work remotely. Then, like any surviving member of an abandoned ship, I checked the desk drawers for bananas.
Not what you expected to read? If you’ve ever found the desk banana too late, it would have been your first move as well.
Next move? Eat all the candy. Well, it wasn’t going to last long anyway, I told myself, cheeks bulging with Andes Mints. The refrigerator came next, although I really should have started there. I was the culprit who left most of the nasty things rotting in the back, but sadly, there was no one to swap this onerous task with.
By April, I was beginning to understand, along with business owners everywhere, that modifications would be needed before staff or clients could be welcomed back. By May, after countless hours installing Plexiglas barriers and six-foot dividers, I started to grasp that I would be staffing the office alone for longer than I’d expected.
Here we are, months later and I’m entirely out of mints. I’ve drunk all the coffee and replaced it with the brew of my choice. I’ve stocked the refrigerator, tuned the radio to my station, brought in a treadmill and spread half-read newspapers over every flat surface.
My extra shoes and sweaters are lying around in the conference room because, heck, I’m really not expecting a conference anytime soon. So far I’ve resisted going barefoot but only because the air conditioning isn’t in my control and it would be too cold.
So many analogies run through one’s mind! Some days I feel like I’m living the bachelor life but on others I resemble a lab rat scurrying around the maze of new dividers. On the days when a computer balks, I channel the last survivor on a spaceship to Mars while I go around the office cannibalizing systems for less sticky keyboards or working speakers.
Meanwhile, like everyone else with an office job, I’ve generated more passwords than I ever thought possible, setting up accounts for everything from Zoom to online ordering for more paperclips. Note to self: Don’t do that again. A simple office supply order resulted in three boxes, shipped on three different days, which I had to figure out how to receive and then break down for recycling.
Why am I telling you all this? Not because I’ve run out of people to talk to, although that possibility looms. It’s because I have to believe that things will eventually revert to some kind of pre-COVID normal. When that day comes … let’s just say it will be an adjustment when someone else tries to put their lunch next to mine in the refrigerator.
And what about you? If you’ve been working in roughly the same way since March as you had been before, you probably won’t need much of a ramp-up when things return to the way they were.
But if you’ve been away from your usual job site, or out of work altogether, I’m beginning to think re-entry could be bumpy. At some point, millions of workers will be asked to undo what they’ve spent months cobbling together, in terms of family schedules, home-based work stations and blurred lines between the personal and professional.
It’s one thing to dress your top half for a virtual meeting; are you ready to find matching pants and shoes and head out the door on time every day? Shoot, are you ready to stop snacking long enough to participate in a real-time, face-to-face meeting? If this situation goes on much longer, we may lose a whole generation of workers who can’t convert to a structure that used to seem normal.
I may be raising the alarm too soon, given that some companies have announced they won’t bring staff back to the office before next summer. Others are declaring that they will never do so. But just in case … it may not be a bad idea to try a few practice runs. What if you were to allocate a week each month to pretend you were in the presence of co-workers? If that’s too much, maybe you could practice fire-drill style to ensure you can still leave the house effectively for a commute to work.
For my part, I plan to pick up my clothes and dirty dishes, just as I do at home (ahem). It’s time to return the office to its pre-COVID state, just in case I need to bring in a tech to fix the copier. I don’t have an extra one of those to strip for parts.
Amy Lindgren owns a career consulting firm in St. Paul. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com.
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Working Strategies: Memoirs of a survivor: Eat the desk candy, ditech the bananas - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press
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