Company mandates RTO, workers commute 50 minute to wear headphones alone and take virtual meetings with coworkers

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  • A man sits at a table with a laptop alone
  • My company mandated RTO and I commuted 50 minutes to wear headphones alone.

    I want to describe my first week back because I don't think I've fully processed it and writing it out feels necessary.
  • there are no assigned desks anymore, the floor is called a neighborhood now which I learned from a laminated sign near the elevator, so I found an empty hot desk, plugged in my laptop, put on my noise canceling headphones and joined a Teams call with my teammate who was sitting directly behind me, close enough that I could hear her
  • voice through my headphones and through her headphones simultaneously creating this faint echo that neither of us ever acknowledged. At lunch I ate alone at my desk because the people I work with rotate in on different days so we're never all there at once, and
  • A man stands in an office, thinking
  • the office was full of people I'd never met from departments I couldn't name who I smiled at near the coffee machine with the same energy you give a stranger in an elevator. My manager Slacked me a question at some point in the
  • afternoon and I Slacked back and we were in the same room the entire time, I could see the back of his head from where I was sitting, and neither of us mentioned it. friday the company sent an all staff email with the subject line -
  • A man holds a laptop in a dark office
  • Celebrating the Return of In- Person Collaboration- and I read it a few times looking for the part where it was a joke. I started looking at fully remote companies sometime after that, found one based out of
  • Amsterdam, contract runs. through Workmotion since I'm not there, and the first morning I worked from my kitchen without headphones on I just sat there for a second and didn't do anything. Anyway. collaboration.

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