Nobody at my company has ever said the words “return to the office”. That is the whole design. When nobody says it, nobody owns it, and when nobody owns it, you can’t quit over it without sounding insane at your own leaving drinks.
It happened the way damp happens. Quietly, in corners, until one morning you notice the whole wall is Tuesday and the landlord says it has “always been like that”.
I have reconstructed the timeline from my inbox. Names have been changed. Not to protect anyone. Just so the badge-swipe dashboard has to work slightly harder to find me.
Week 1: The Announcement That Was Not an Announcement
An email from leadership, subject line “Nothing Is Changing!”, with an exclamation mark, which is how you know your life is about to change. We remain “proudly hybrid”. There will be “optional in-office lunches” on Wednesdays. The word optional appears four times. Nobody writes “optional” four times about something optional. Nobody emails you to say breathing is optional. They just let you notice when the air runs out.
Week 3: The Lunch
The optional lunch is a tray of wraps and a speech about “the magic of being together”. The wraps have been out since 10am. They have been together longer than most marriages on my floor. Attendance is not taken. There is simply a man named Derek with a clipboard who insists the clipboard is “for allergies”. Derek has never once asked about allergies. Derek writes down faces.
Week 6: Core Collaboration Days
We are introduced to “core collaboration days”. Tuesday and Thursday. Collaboration is “where the magic happens”, which makes Monday, Wednesday and Friday officially magic-free. Leadership has accidentally put in writing what my output has been saying for years.
Week 9: The Dashboard
A badge-swipe dashboard launches “purely for space planning”. Each team is a coloured bar. Ours is beige and short. A second email clarifies that beige is “not a judgement”. Nobody sends a second email about something that isn’t a judgement. Three people on my team updated their CVs that afternoon. One of them was Derek.
Hybrid used to mean you split your week. Now it means the office splits you, and keeps the bigger half.
Week 12: Core Collaboration Days, Extended
Wednesday joins the core “for momentum”. Momentum is a physics term meaning “an object in a commute stays in a commute until it retires or dies, whichever HR can process faster”. Monday remains optional, but there is now a “Monday Kickoff” with pastries, available only to bodies physically present. The pastries are excellent. This is not a mandate. It is a croissant with a policy, and the croissant has more leverage than you.
Week 15: The Survey
An anonymous survey asks how we feel about flexibility. More than half of us say we’d leave for it. Leadership responds with a heartfelt all-hands, delivered from a home office overlooking a lake, thanking us for our honesty and announcing “Connection Fridays”. The survey was anonymous. The follow-up survey asks for your badge number “to personalise your experience”. It will.
Week 18: Where We Are Now
We remain proudly hybrid. Part of the week is spent in the office, and the rest is spent in the office thinking about the flat you pay rent on so a sofa can live there alone. The policy expanded to fill the available days, like a goldfish that got a bigger tank and became a landlord.
I started a resistance movement. We meet on Mondays, from our kitchens, cameras off. There were six of us. There are now four. Two were “restructured”, a word that means exactly what it sounds like, if what it sounds like is a lanyard in a bin.
It is not a mandate. It is a croissant with a policy.
Last Saturday I logged on from my sofa, purely to feel something. Derek messaged within minutes to say this was “great to see”, and asked if I could badge in to do it. I said I’d think about it. He has already booked me a desk. It faces the wall. It is the desk the last guy had.