My employer asked for honest feedback

At some point before I started working here, there was an employee satisfaction survey that revealed that flexibility was one of the areas people felt needed to be improved in the department. They've now issued a follow-up survey to give people a chance to elaborate on their thoughts with open ended questions. I wrote this.

Remote work.

Each workday, I rise well before sunrise. In the summer, my dog wakes me before my alarm has a chance to sound, but somewhere around the equinox, that changes. I try to persuade her out into the yard, but it’s dark and cold. She’s no fool. She curls up on her blanket and watches me go through my perplexing morning routine. 

Does she think I’m a fool? Am I? If it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck, it is most likely a duck, and the things I’m doing are undeniably foolish.

My home is what I’ve invested most of my income in. I work diligently to maintain it in a way that maximizes my comfort and mental clarity. Nevertheless, I leave that cherished place for the bulk of my waking hours, exchanging it for the beige walls of a windowless cube that I would never choose for myself. But before I can even get to that point, first I must engage in a sickening ritual of human madness: commuting.

I leave my home and begin my journey by car, propelled by a pollutant that currently costs somewhere around $8,392 a gallon. I join the macabre parade of other commuters behind the wheels of their own vehicles. I see a Ford F150 nearly roll over a school crossing guard as a group of small children scurry past in the pre-dawn haze. The driver barely looks up from his phone. I feel ashamed by association. 

I come to a stop amid the construction that will pave even more of the land to make room for even more of me and the F150 and our ilk. Until then, we clog up the intersection, getting in each other’s way while the minutes tick by and the gasoline in our cars’ engines burns fruitlessly. I am a captive audience for the full cycle of the traffic light three times in a row before I get my chance to go through. 

Those minutes provide no benefit to my employer; I can’t work from the driver’s seat. They provide no benefit to me as I’m neither compensated for them nor able to do any of my own chores or leisure activities or even rest while behind the wheel. It’s time spent idling, wasting, polluting, gaining age without wisdom. Each minute is a grain of sand through the hourglass that I will never, ever get back.

There are no other feasible options to avoid that daily humiliation. I’m reminded of this when I reach the office and drive past the mockery that is the disused bus stop out front. In a different time, a few dozen of us could have kept our cars off the road this morning and consolidated into a single vehicle, making this town just a little bit safer, quieter, and cleaner. But no buses come here anymore, even though my colleagues and I still must. 

I arrive at my desk, turn on my computer, and pull up documents that are based in The Cloud™, a concept the technocrats sold us on years ago with the promise that we could access everything from everywhere in exchange for giving them control over it. It’s a fair enough trade, I suppose, except I’m not really using the benefits, am I? I came into an office to work on these files. They may as well be on a hard drive, or a floppy desk, or in a metal filing cabinet from 1962.

But no, my files have transcended the physical world. They’re in a mystical land of ones and zeroes that I could have accessed 45 minutes ago from my beloved home. Instead, I’m in a suburban office building for reasons I don’t fully understand, listening to the incessant rattling of the HVAC system overhead and sharing stale air with the other denizens of this place.

Finally, it’s time to buckle down and get some work done. I like the work. I like researching and thinking and learning. When my colleagues and I have questions for each other, we communicate through our computers via chat or email. Some days I hardly see another person even though I know they’re just on the other side of the melancholy beige cube walls around me, beneath the same unforgiving fluorescent lights. 

There’s a paradox in cubicle farm office culture. You can choose to respect your colleagues’ time and space as they do the work they’re here to do. This means being courteous, quiet, and keeping to yourself when there isn’t a business-related reason to interrupt them. Or you can try to foster collegial relationships with friendly conversation, but you do so knowing that your chatting with one is likely distracting to another who is trying to focus nearby. Both are valid options. Both are bad options.

Sometimes I’m busy and the day goes by at a steady clip. Sometimes my tasks are stuck on “awaiting input” and I find myself thinking about what’s happening at my home while I’m away. The business casual clothing I ordered is now sitting in its shipping box, vulnerable on my front porch. The load of laundry I left in the dryer this morning is now lying still, forming deep wrinkles. My dog is looking at the closed door, lonely, wondering what she did to make me leave her again and hoping I’ll return before her bladder reaches capacity. 

The version of me who works from home could resolve all these problems in seconds and still cross every work item off their to-do list by afternoon. The version of me in the cubicle is powerless to do anything but mentally claw at the beige walls, listen to the rattling vents, and wait for the hands of the clock to reach the arbitrary position indicating that the workers of the world are dismissed to go and sacrifice another piece of their one wild and precious life to the archaic commuting ritual.

I haven't submitted it yet but I do appreciate having this outlet for creative prose at work.