I was into the office for the first time this week after we cleaned out a lot of our floors to reduce our footprint and reorganize the remaining floors for hybrid work. I had to go in to replace my laptop, and took the opportunity to take a tour of the new floors.
My god, what a depressing two hours that was. The restaurant I used to go to for breakfast is closed, and the convenience store next door had maybe 1/3 of their shelves partially filled. The working floor (which used to be the one I worked on) was mostly a ghost town, with maybe 10 people working there. I think that, if I were one of those extroverts who really wanted to go back to the office “for the human interaction”, this would have been even worse than staying home. The few people who were there just emphasized how few they were.
And then there’s the stupidity. We have two main garages in our building. They spent most of the pandemic refurbishing one, the one closest to the actual building, making it really good. Bright lights, wide parking spaces, possibly the nicest garage I’ve ever seen.
But they still won’t let you use it for day parking - only monthly pass holders allowed. So it’s completely empty. I was stuck using the other, crappy garage. Dark, falling apart, cramped, small spaces and temporary columns holding up the ceilings, placed such that they get in the way when taking ramps up or down a level. It was always a shitty garage, but now it’s distinctly even more awful. As I finally squeezed my way out of that dungeon of a garage, I swore I’d never park there again.
Traveling as I do, I often stay in downtowns of major or minor cities. Some of them have bounced back nearly completely from COVID, and others still look like there’s a war or plague or Depression going on right now today. It’s frankly surprising to me how much variation there is.
Now in any given downtown I usually only traipse around maybe 5-8 blocks in any direction, and not in every direction. So my sampling may be biased in some cases and the hotel happens to be right next to extra-large businesses that decamped en masse to WFH, leaving a mountain of empty office space all within 3 or 4 blocks of each other.
For sure it’s weird from my POV, and I never get inside to see how the offices are. Just the retail / bar / restaurant end of things.
That’s been my experience, when I’ve gone back into the office.
There have been a few occasions in which senior management actively worked to get people into the office on a particular day, such as last month, when our agency’s new CEO (who isn’t based in our city) was going to be in our office for a day. We had a really good turnout then.
But, usually, when I go in, there are fewer than a dozen of us there that day, in an office space that’s built to house 75+ people. It’s a tomb.
When the building is sparsely populated, one thing that makes it even harder to work is that noises tend to stand out more. When there are lots of people, there’s a constant background din that your brain tunes out. But when it’s really quiet, any noise is noticeable. Like if you’re working in a coffee shop, you can often ignore all the conversations around you. But if you’re in a library and a single person is talking, it’s noticeable and annoying. It’s the same way in these deserted offices. In the past I would just tune out noises like people on conference calls, but now it’s distracting.
We recently received notice that all federal agencies are to re-examine telework and make plans to reopen offices to the public. Sounds like it will be doe on a component-by-component basis. No idea what they are going to decide for our office in which the statute guarantees the public in person hearings, but covid has made clear that a majority of claimants and their representatives prefer doing them via phone.
Sigh. My boss just told me that there are fairly solid rumors that the CEO wants full time employees to return to the office at least twice a week, and it’s not clear how that will work for me. But it may be the trigger that leads me to retire.
And something else: My company built a new building adjacent to the Corporate HQ ages ago that was intended to be warmed by employee’s body heat and the heat generated by all the various electric/electronic devices. Well, my work group was one of the first to move in, and until other groups moved in over a few months, it was freezing. It was winter, but this is SoCal, and I was bundled up like it was winter in the MidWest. I actually bought fingerless gloves!
Lord I hope that will become a paperless process. There are a handful of immigration fees that can now be paid by credit card, and more and more application types that can be filed online. The online systems are super clunky, but maybe by the time I retire (I’m 54), it will be possible to run an immigration law practice that doesn’t need to cut physical checks. At least COVID forced USCIS to stop requiring physical wet ink signatures on petitions…
Yeah, I also work for a law firm and our employee manual has the same rule. But people violate it routinely, and in fact I just learned that my own boss just moved to a state with no Firm office. The same boss who gave me a really hard time when I objected to the firm’s initial attempt to make us all RTO (in July 2021, which was very short-lived because of Delta). That attempt was pretty damn tone-deaf - “the practice of law is collaborative, so lawyers are encouraged to go to the office 2x/week, while nonlawyers are required to go 3x/week!” So I am supposed to collaborate more efficiently with people who aren’t even there in person? Last I checked, I am not a lawyer, so practicing law would be outside the scope of my job description. Also I have crappy lungs and the firm dropped the mask requirement, so I said “screw that” and requested - and got - an ADA accommodation and have been 100% WFH ever since.
Anyway, I actually generally like my nominal boss, and I am glad she has come around to the idea that it’s possible to do my job 100% remotely. But more than a little amused that she now lives out of state, and that HR must know that.
Ha! My attorney still wanted my wet signature. So I’d come into the office, print the petition, sign it, send him a copy, and keep the original in my files. I no longer handle immigration issues at work, which is a shame because after nearly three years I was starting to feel like I knew what I was doing. (Not that I still didn’t need my attorney.)
USCIS will still not accept e-signatures on paper-filed petitions, but they will accept a scan of an ink signature (which is what I meant). In fact the one pandemic-era WFH petition filing delay I had was when a client’s spouse put her letterhead somewhere where she couldn’t find it and she had to have the office mail her some more After all this time, though, I am amazed at all the clients who WFH regularly in jobs that require the occasional bit of printing, but still haven’t acquired printers. I have one which I have used for work things a handful of times (signing translation affidavits, etc., which I then scan and email to my work email so I can add them to electronic copies of filings). I have suggested smartphone scanning apps to more than a few clients, too.
Somewhat recently our senior management person arranged for everyone in our sizeable department to get a cookie. One cookie. One vaguely quality cookie. One rather modestly-sized vaguely quality cookie. It was a perfectly decent cookie. I mean, not a great cookie. But certainly an okay cookie. I ate mine.
My morale did not noticeably improve. Far as I can tell my reaction was pretty close to universal among my co-workers.
After all this time, though, I am amazed at all the clients who WFH regularly in jobs that require the occasional bit of printing, but still haven’t acquired printers. I have one which I have used for work things a handful of times (signing translation affidavits, etc., which I then scan and email to my work email so I can add them to electronic copies of filings). I have suggested smartphone scanning apps to more than a few clients, too.