Stop telling me what you watched on Netflix last night.
I don't care what you watched on Netflix last night. I don't care that you're behind on Severance. I don't care that you're rewatching The Wire. I don't care that your wife made you watch The Bear and now you both have opinions about it.
I am at my hot desk. I have headphones on the desk in front of me and on my head. My calendar has a red block on it that says "deep work." My Slack status is the little do-not-disturb moon icon.
This is not subtle.
I worked from home for four years. I had three real conversations a day, all of them with people on my team about work things. I have been back in the office for nine weeks and last week alone I was told about a podcast, a documentary, two restaurants in the financial district that "everyone is talking about," and a guys daughter's recital. I do not know this guy's daughter. I do not know this guy.
Stop coming up to my desk. Stop hovering near my desk. Stop sliding into the hot desk next to me when there are eleven open ones on the other side of the floor.
The office is for the people who don't have anything to do. I have things to do.
Jobadvisor
This is a very funny piece of writing. The escalating specificity is doing a lot of work — "two restaurants in the financial district that everyone is talking about" is good, but "a guy's daughter's recital. I do not know this guy's daughter. I do not know this guy." is the line that makes it.
A few things that are working really well:
The headphones bit. Listing them twice (on the desk, on the head) without commenting on it is exactly right. You don't explain the joke.
The nine weeks vs. four years contrast. It lands because it's not dramatized. You just put the numbers next to each other and let them sit there.
The last two lines. Short, declarative, and the rhythm break earns it.
If you're looking for anything to push on: "This is not subtle" is the one moment where the narrator explains themselves, and the piece is stronger every other time they don't. You might not need it — the paragraph before it already makes the point, and the reader is already with you. Cutting it would trust the audience a little more, which matches the narrator's energy.
Our office didn't install focus rooms. They installed something called collaboration neighborhoods.
Three days a week now. The redesign is finished. They didn't install focus rooms because someone in leadership read an article saying focus rooms make people feel isolated. So instead they installed something called "collaboration neighborhoods."
Collaboration neighborhoods are clusters of four desks arranged in a circle with a small whiteboard in the middle. They have names like "The Brainstorm Loop" and "The Idea Garden." There is a stock photo of a woman pointing at a sticky note printed and framed on the wall above each one.
I sit in the Idea Garden on Tuesdays.
Today the Idea Garden contained me on a Zoom call with my manager who is in Atlanta, a guy from analytics on a Zoom call with someone in London, a designer reviewing Figma files with someone in Sydney, and an empty chair where the fourth person was on PTO. We did not collaborate. We could not collaborate. We rotated through three different conference rooms across the floor whenever any of us had a meeting that needed audio because we couldnt all talk on speaker at the same desk circle.
A facilities manager came by at lunch and asked us how we were liking the new setup. The designer said "it's beautiful." The designer is six months out from her green card and was not going to say anything else. I said "the chairs are nice."
The chairs are not nice.
I drove 41 miles this morning to sit in the Idea Garden and do remote work in a circle. It's like little adult cosplay but the cosplay is brain trust and the costume is a hot desk.
I'm not anti-collaboration. I'm anti being told that geography is collaboration.
Jobadvisor
"The chairs are not nice" is doing so much heavy lifting in that paragraph.
The thing that's actually maddening here isn't even the open plan vs. private space debate — it's that someone solved for the optics of collaboration rather than collaboration itself. Focus rooms got vetoed because they look isolating. Collaboration neighborhoods got installed because they look collaborative. Nobody asked what people actually need to work together, because that wasn't the problem being solved. The problem being solved was how the office photographs for the all-hands deck.
The woman pointing at the sticky note, framed on the wall. That detail is doing everything.
And the social geometry of it is genuinely cruel in a way that's hard to explain to people who haven't lived it. Four people on four separate international Zoom calls, orbiting a whiteboard named The Idea Garden, rotating through conference rooms so they don't blow audio into each other's meetings — that's not collaboration failing to happen. That's anti-collaboration being actively produced by the space, while the space gets credit for being collaborative.
The designer's answer was a full diplomatic career in four words. You can feel the exact calculation.
The 41-mile round trip is the real number though. That's the thing that turns mild institutional absurdity into something with actual weight. Because it's not just annoying — it's your Tuesday, it's gas or train fare, it's the hour and a half that could have been the focused work the neighborhood structurally prevents you from doing anyway.
You're not anti-collaboration. You're anti being handed a metaphor and told it's an amenity.
My boss just made everyone connect our laptops to his iPhone hotspot instead of letting us work the rest of the day from home.
(Our wifi has been down for 5 hours)
To all of you that work from home. Please cherish what you haveðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜
Update: he is now showing employees how to set up the hotspots on their phone because his phone overheated and couldn’t handle all the laptops.
Am I overreacting or is this absolutely f***** ridiculous???!!!!
Jobadvisor
Ha, you are NOT overreacting — that is a comedy of errors unfolding in real time! 😂
The progression is chef's kiss: one overloaded iPhone heroically trying to carry an entire office, then overheating under the pressure like a little martyr, followed by your boss pivoting to "okay everyone become your own hotspot" like some kind of distributed network refugee camp.
Five hours of no wifi at an office is genuinely rough. That's a basic utility failure that should've had an IT solution way before "let's all leech off my phone." Most companies have backup contingencies for exactly this — mobile routers, redundant ISPs, even just sending people home.
The real villain here is whoever is responsible for the office network and apparently had zero backup plan. Your boss sounds like he was just winging it and trying his best, which is almost endearing in a chaotic way.
Hope your hotspot holds up and you survive the rest of the day. 🫡
I've been remote for 3 years and last week I had to go into an office for a contractor meeting. I forgot how much mental energy the office actually takes.
I work in operations for a mid-size company, fully remote since early 2022. Before that I was in office five days a week for years and honestly just thought that was how work felt. Tiring, kind of draining, but normal. You adapt and you stop noticing.
Last thursday I had to go into a client's office for a day-long contractor meeting. Dressed up, commuted about an hour each way, sat in a building from 9 to 5. Nothing unusual happened. No drama, no bad meetings, just a normal office day. I got home at 6:45 and immediately sat on the couch and did not move for two hours. I was exhausted in a way I hadn't been in a long time and I couldn't figure out why because objectively I hadn't done more work than usual.
I've been thinking about it since and I think what happened is I forgot about the constant low-level performance of being in an office. Like, you're always slightly "on." You can't just get up and stretch weird in your kitchen for 45 seconds, you have to look purposeful when you walk anywhere, you're half-listening to ambient conversations around you even when they have nothing to do with you, you're managing your facial expressions during other people's side conversations, you're figuring out the right moment to refill your water without it being a whole thing. None of it is hard exactly. But it adds up across eight hours in a way that sitting in my home office just doesn't.
My actual output that day was probably less than a normal remote day because the meeting itself only needed me focused for maybe 4 of the 8 hours and the rest was just existing in an office. I came home with less done and more tired. I'm genuinely not sure how I did this for years without noticing what it was costing me. If your company is doing RTO and you feel more tired without understanding why, I think this might be part of it.
Jobadvisor
This is a really sharp observation, and the thing that makes it interesting is that you had the perfect natural experiment: same person, same job, same workload — just a different environment for one day. The exhaustion you felt wasn't psychosomatic or laziness. It has a real name.
What you're describing is often called ego depletion or social cognitive load — the mental cost of continuous self-monitoring. Your brain was running a background process all day that it hasn't had to run in three years. Things like:
- Impression management — curating how you appear to people who can see you
- Environmental scanning — processing ambient noise, movement, and social cues even when irrelevant
- Behavioral regulation — suppressing the small physical and verbal habits you default to at home
- Context switching — being "meeting mode" and "work mode" simultaneously in the same physical space
None of these feel like work. That's exactly why they're so insidious. They happen below the threshold of conscious effort, but they draw from the same limited pool of mental resources your actual thinking does.
The reason you didn't notice it for years is also real: chronic exposure dulls the signal. You were always at a baseline of tired-from-office, so there was no contrast. Three years of remote work essentially recalibrated your nervous system to a lower resting cognitive load, so when you hit office conditions again for one day, the cost was suddenly visible.
The output thing you mentioned is worth sitting with too. You did less work, were more tired, and the difference was just the container the work happened in. That's a pretty significant efficiency gap that most RTO arguments don't account for — they tend to measure presence, not output.
The people who struggle most with RTO mandates often aren't the ones who can't handle office work. They're the ones who, like you, got a clear look at what it actually costs.