It’s been a long time since I spoke to you about the pandemic. In fact, I don’t want to hear about it any more than you do, but I wonder how it’s going, your coming back to life? Your return to the office? Your return to office life?
Posted at 9:00 a.m.
Last week, I overheard a discussion in an elevator between employees who were reuniting after months of working from home.
“I have trouble concentrating, I work better from home.
“Me, it took me two hours to get to the city center…”
Everyone snickered conspiratorially, which is the beginning of a reunion between colleagues who share the reality of 9 to 5. In the midst of a labor shortage, employers will have to be flexible so that workers do not return to back into the office towers, which seem to belong to the “world before”. And that’s if they come back. In New York, the office occupancy rate peaked at 38% after two years of the pandemic.
To The Press, we are in gradual return. On the first day, I got chills hearing the collective murmur and click of keyboards in a newsroom that hadn’t been this full since March 2020. I chatted with so many colleagues that I walked home me dizzy, not far from vertigo. The fact of having finished the day before the excellent dystopian series Severancewhere employees agree through surgery to mentally separate their office life from their personal life (without remembering what is going on in either sphere of their lives), must not have helped.
But I didn’t once think about the virus in the crowded room.
The post-pandemic recovery – without knowing if it is over – fascinates me. The machine starts working again, but not only does it feel rusty, it is also missing pieces. A multitude of small bugs accompanies this recovery, because the jobs are not all filled, and the collective trauma is inscribed in our flesh and in our habits. We realize this when we go through a bureaucratic process. It’s reminiscent of the house that drives Asterix crazy, but with closed offices.
Two years of reflection have had their effect: people have meditated, adjusted and completely changed their life, even their city. Many are those who did not want to resume the rhythm of before.
This social phenomenon has been called “the Great Resignation”.
Pandemic fatigue, too, has sent many people into retirement earlier than expected. I lost my sweet dentist just like that. We notice that in the media, this played on decisions. The retirement of Pierre Bruneau, the departure of Michel Lacombe, that of Joël Le Bigot, the non-renewal of Paul Houde’s contract, the end of District 31of The evening is still youngfrom the program of Denis Lévesque, The more the merrier, the more we read… The return to autumn will not be in continuity, as if certain values had died on the health soap opera.
When I was a teenager, I thought that a job in an office must be so much better than working like I did at the Poulet Frit Kentucky on Papineau Avenue, where I experienced two hold-ups. There was something prestigious in my head about working in an office, rather than in a fast food. However, looking back, I realize that I really liked the contact with the public, because we couldn’t be closer to the very true saying that it takes “everything to make a world”. I still fondly remember a tiny little old woman with Alzheimer’s who always ordered a hot dog where only chicken was sold. Or those prostitutes who told me, when ordering a PFK barrel, how much it was worth in pipes, to make me blush.
It came back to me when I saw the Hachez family working at the restaurant Chez Philippe, which has just closed its doors. These are such demanding jobs, with a direct human relationship, that you don’t see the day go by. I later worked in offices during my studies, and I still remember the stinging feeling of being in prison watching how many minutes I had left before finding a time that belonged to me. In one of them, Cité Rock Détente was playing 9 to 5, I worriedly began to like all the songs that passed, in a musical version of Stockholm Syndrome.
In the 1990s, I even worked in an office where we was punching a time card, which made me feel like it was 1970, like in the song My country by Réjean Ducharme and Robert Charlebois.
It takes everything to put his punch card in the slot of the clock…
We were young, we partied until the wee hours, we often had both eyes shut tight. But this time machine, even the 15-minute break, was an anachronism already in the 1990s, so unbearable and ridiculous that one of my colleagues, one bad day at the office, demolished the machine with a blow of his fist. It must be said that we all saw it as a symbol of alienation.
You don’t see the time passing when you’re happy, when you’re with people you like, so it’s better to be happy in what you do and with whom you do it. I’ve probably chosen a job that occupies my mind 24 hours a day – which isn’t always relaxing – so that I don’t have to punch or staring at the hands of a clock on the wall.
Just saying…