It'll be months until I see her again.
 | By Max Strasser International Editor, Opinion |
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For about two years, I sat next to Jen, a member of Opinion’s audience team in London. Jen has a collection of quirky sweaters and a contagious laugh and smart comments on the news and funny stories from her weekends. I haven’t seen Jen since the middle of March. I miss Jen. |
Jen and I still work together, technically. But the truth is that our jobs don’t overlap all that often. Once the enforced camaraderie of the open-plan office disappeared from our lives, so, for the most part, did our conversations about music and cycling. Occasionally we’ll talk on the messaging app Slack when we have to workshop a headline, but it’s just not the same. |
I suspect that if you’ve been stuck working at home for the last seven months, you have a Jen-shaped hole in your life, too. |
Ashley Fetters writes about this in an Op-Ed today, “Your Work Friends Knew Exactly What Kind of Week You’d Had.” Ashley, a journalist, misses a quick hello in the elevator and a longer end-of-the-week beer with her newsroom colleagues. And she talked to experts who told her that these office encounters don’t just make the workday a little more bearable, they are — or were — genuinely good for our mental health. |
There are certainly aspects of working from home that I appreciate: I’m not spending any time commuting; I can’t remember the last time I ate a £10 chopped salad at my desk; yesterday, I was able to run some errands around noon in my neighborhood. But there’s a lot that I don’t like, too. The New York Times recently told employees that we wouldn’t be required to go back to the office until July 2021 — nearly nine months from now. |
It might be a long time until I see Jen. |
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