Practically speaking, there's some wiggle room—probably through the end of the year. Our leadership recognizes that we need to re-adjust our lives after two years of working from home, and some people are still uncomfortable about being in the office, mixing with lots of people, indoors.
I've made the pilgrimmage a couple of times during the “optional” return-to-office period; for all but one of those visits, I received a follow-up message that someone who had been in one of the same buildings had tested positive for COVID-19 ... (despite the requirement to be vaccinated, or have a valid exemption, to work onsite).
How about we reckon with whether the old way of doing things really made sense?
I'm all for being onsite if we're getting together as a group, brainstorming in a room with a whiteboard.
But to sit in conference rooms all day, meeting with colleagues in far-flung offices? Nope. I can do that from home—and not resent early-morning meetings with folks in Europe and late-day meetings with folks on the other side of the Pacific.
Have we forgotten how most of our team members sat at their desks wearing headphones, so they could effectively concentrate on their work in our open-plan office environment? [Sure, a serendipitous conversation would occasionally break through.]
Count me in the less-than-enthusiastic camp about returning. And certainly with no plan to spend 90 minutes or more of my day sealed up on a commuter shuttle bus.
I did get my hair chopped off, though. I could say that it was time to look respectable again, but in reality it had just become a nuisance.
Our county has recorded 310,016 cases of COVID-19 and 2,272 deaths—well over twice the number of cases, but only 135 more deaths, than the last time I shared these numbers (Week 62). I know many more people who've contracted the virus (some, more than once); fortunately none required hospitalization.
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