My home office is very well equipped. I have a desktop computer, a printer and whiteboards that I installed with the ambitious idea that I would use them to map projects. There are shelves with several editions of my books, some of which I can’t read because I don’t speak Hebrew, Farsi, Turkish or Polish. There are shelves with reference books and galleys and other books related to various projects. I have a home studio to record “Hear to Slay”, the podcast that I present with Tressie McMillan Cottom.
I spent most of the days looking at people in small squares on my computer monitor, because now that everyone is home, people find all kinds of excuses to hold meetings. I have lights for events and television appearances because there’s not much going on in the studios anymore. Also, vanity. From time to time, a rigid box of audiovisual equipment is sent to my home with a laminated instruction card providing the necessary guidelines for using the equipment. From time to time, a film crew comes home wearing their protective gear. They are almost two meters away and I look at a video monitor, talking to a producer elsewhere.
Almost every day I marvel at how the world has adapted to the pandemic. I thought I was no longer participating in public events, but sometime during the summer of 2020, events went online and now I’m back to doing several events a week, sometimes in places that otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend take to school or City. I like live events, but doing them is virtually not the same thing. When I go on stage and see a thousand people applauding, the energy is absolutely electric and unexpected. It’s surreal because I’m just a writer. It is magical because I know that we will have an experience that cannot be reproduced.
And I miss the line of autographs, where I could spend a few minutes with the readers, hearing about their lives, seeing that my work might matter a little. Now, I look presentable from the waist up and sit at my basketball shorts table, and when the event is over, that’s it.
Most of my friends with more traditional jobs are also working from home. They created offices in their homes. They go out with their pets, their children, their partners. They do their job as well as before. And a surprising number of these friends don’t seem to want to go back to the office. For those who do not have children of school age, there is time to take care of running a home while taking care of the task of doing work. They can cook and do errands and gardening between work tasks. There is no way to dress like a prank at work. Bras and pants with buttons and ties and high heels and a face full of makeup were abandoned. There is no more travel – all that time in a car, squeezing the steering wheel, moving slowly. No more trying to get the job done by being interrupted every 10 minutes or by listening to a colleague complaining nonstop.
But much has also been lost. Despite all the flaws in the workplace, there is a certain camaraderie that accompanies life in an office. A good meeting can be invigorating in a way that is difficult to replicate with Zoom. We can’t go to our favorite work buddy’s office for coffee and gossip when we need a break. It’s all Slack chat, emails and phone calls and everything that happens at home after work, without any distance. The balance between personal and professional life has imploded for better and for worse. In many of the Friend of Work letters I receive, I can see how this implosion has changed the way people feel about their work.
There is a lot of dissatisfaction – people who are bored with their jobs or who simply hate what they do or hate the people they work with, but cannot see a way out. Many women deal with condescending bosses, wage disparities and a lack of maternity accommodation. Many men are trying to figure out how to navigate the workplace as cultural norms change. People from all walks of life want to know how they can make their companies more inclusive and how to deal with institutional racism, or resent these efforts because they feel wrongly involved.