Financial district employees report that commuting to office is “exactly as annoying as we remembered” after two years of working from home
New York City
Manhattan office workers have returned to commuting to their offices after two years of working from home, and they’ve discovered something they’re treating as a shocking revelation: commuting is terrible and they hate it, which was apparently forgotten during the pandemic period when they were staying home.
“I forgot how much commuting sucks,” one worker stated after spending ninety minutes on a subway experiencing all the discomforts that had made him happy to work from home. “The crowds, the delays, the smell, the fact that I spend three hours per day on transit to spend eight hours in a cubicle. This is exactly as annoying as I remember it being.”
The return-to-office mandate has created an interesting situation where employers are forcing employees to commute to offices to sit at desks they occupied for the same amount of productivity they achieved from home, except now the employees are tired, annoyed, and increasingly aware that remote work solved multiple problems that employers are now recreating.
One manager explained his reasoning for the return-to-office mandate: “Collaboration is better in person.” The irony is that the collaboration isn’t actually better; it’s just more physically present, which is different. The employees accomplish the same work they did remotely, except now they do it while sitting next to people they don’t particularly want to sit next to while experiencing the subway.
The financial district is experiencing a renaissance of people who are desperately unhappy to be there, which is what the financial district experienced before the pandemic except now with the additional knowledge that they don’t have to be there because they proved it for two years.
Satire about work at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine.
SOURCE: bohiney.com