Back in the building
I've been going back to the studio two days a week since the end of August. Tuesdays and Thursdays, masks on, half the desks taped off, a sign on every conference room telling you how many people it holds now, which is about a third of what it used to.
The bus over the bridge is the same bus. I'd forgotten how much I liked it: forty minutes with nothing to do but look at the water and listen to other people's phone calls. I got more writing done in my head on that bus than at any desk I've ever had, and I didn't know it until I'd gone a year and a half without it.
The building is strange. It's built for a lot of people and it has a few, so every sound carries. You can hear someone open a bag of chips from across the floor. The kitchen still smells like the same burnt coffee, which I found more moving than I'd like to admit.
The woman at the front desk was there on my first morning back, the same as she was on my first morning ever, seven years ago, when she checked me in and told me where the good bathroom was and that I'd be fine. I found out this week that she came in through most of the last year, alone some days, to sign for packages and water the plants nobody else remembered. The plants look better than any of us. She looked at me over her mask and said, "You cut your hair," which I had, in my kitchen, in April of last year, badly, and she was kind enough not to say the last part.
And the hallway arguments are back. That's the thing I missed most and didn't know how to say on a video call. On Tuesday, before I'd found my desk, Owen stopped me by the elevators to tell me something I'd said in a meeting in March was wrong, and we stood there for twenty minutes settling it, and neither of us won, and it was the best twenty minutes of my month. You can't do that over a screen. Somebody has to be able to walk away, and somebody has to follow them.
I don't know how long two days a week will last, or whether it'll be more or fewer by Christmas. Nobody does. I'm taking the Tuesdays and Thursdays while they're on offer.
If you've gone back somewhere this year, what was the first thing you noticed?