Thoughts on Office Life

I cleaned out my old office in Washington, DC this week.

I've had an office in Washington since 1993, so this was the end of a long saga. My old employers moved into our current space in 2010. I was in a cubicle for a few years but some time around 2013 I moved into a big double office that I shared with one of my colleagues. The space was big enough for three desks but there were only two computer connections, so we got a good deal. On the other hand, the extra space meant that we started accumulating stuff. In particular, books; all the books that anyone purchased for particular projects ended up on our shelves. (It sometimes happens that you have a project in, say, Lynchburg, and the most convenient way to get information you need is to buy a copy of a book like Lynchburg: An Architectural History.) Then my boss retired and all of his stuff descended on us, including thirty years worth of American Antiquity. Then our Richmond office closed and we got all their books. Plus all the old cameras people weren't using any more.

Then my old company was purchased by a much bigger firm, and we suddenly had a lot more offices. My old company had rather few, so (for example) all the cultural resource people in the Washington-Baltimore area were in one office. But the new company has six offices within the region, and people started going to the one closest to their homes. Around 2019 my office mate, who lives in Baltimore, started going to the office in Baltimore instead of commuting to Washington. We held onto his desk, though, because we were in the middle of hiring multiple new people, and we thought at least one would end up in Washington. None did. Then the pandemic hit and everybody went home. 

At some point we were ordered to return to the office two days a week, but when I did I immediately got Covid-19, and anyway that experiment in part-time office work ramped up very slowly. For a long time the office was completely empty on Mondays and Fridays. I never really got back into the habit of riding down to Washington, and one thing about a long commute is that is a lot easier when you rigidly make it part of your routine. Plus, with no other cultural resources folks in DC the rationale for commuting down there seemed dubious; with whom was I supposed to interact? For long stretches I had no projects working with anyone else in DC. (Instead I have projects in Orlando, New York City, Palo Alto, the Great Smokies, the Mojave Desert, and all across Virginia and North Carolina, and I have never seen most of the people working on these projects.)

I went to the office less and less; I think until this week I had been in the office twice since June. But other people have been going back, and space now is tight, and last week they asked me to surrender the large space I have been occupying alone for more than four years.

I am ambivalent about this. I don't miss commuting down to my office to turn on my computer and interact with people across the country in exactly the way I would from home. I do miss when I was part of a group of people with similar skills and interests, who worked for the same clients and often worked together on projects. That was great.

I also wonder about young people starting out. I learned an enormous amount just being around my old boss, and being together with other archaeologists and historians, and I think we have had some significant mentoring failures since our office broke up. It seems to be much easier to do things that have become routine to you via the internet than to learn to do them.

So when I think about the question of whether working together in an office is important or "worth it," my own experience compels me to ask: working together with whom, and doing what?