Orifice Hours: Columnists and commentators unite to play an arse symphony in praise of offices and the commute...
The ultimate WFH crew think *you* should be back in the office
If you’ve read this newsletter before you’ll know that among the jokes, ad hominems, and howls of existential rage I try to slip in at least a little clear-eyed analysis. However, upon reading the leader column in yesterday’s Sunday Times, I could only manage two words: Fuck off.
The top item cobbled together under the paper’s collective byline was a rat fink rallying cry: Get back into the office — your city centre needs you. It provoked noxious nostalgia for last year when newspapers colluded with Rishi ‘Eat out to spread Covid about’ Sunak, handshake Johnson, and the commercial landlords in poking people back towards the office blocks.
Despite a less ‘Lord Kitchener as Pret shareholder’ headline online (To revive city centres we need less talk, more action), The Sunday Times leader writers’ tone remains patrician:
Britain stands on the brink of a new normal as schools return after the summer break. When it comes to offices, we believe in the power of collaboration that comes from teams working together in the same physical space. It is how the young learn from the experienced, and how new ideas and products are born. It puts people on a roughly equal footing and does away with the nightmare logistics of having meetings where some attend in the flesh and others via video.
More profoundly, white-collar staff should not forget that many others have had to keep going into work throughout the pandemic — into factories, petrol stations, supermarkets — to keep the economy running. We risk creating a two-tier society if an affluent bloc of professionals works from home indefinitely.
If you believe that The Sunday Times is suddenly suffused with sympathy for the gig workers and retail staff of Britain, I’ve got several large bridges in London for sale. In common with the majority of newspapers, The Times and Sunday Times preaches the gospel of the market until such time as real estate firms and commercial landlords are under the cosh.
That leader headline is an admission that most city centres — and in truth, they’re talking about London in particular — are designed to serve the economy over communities. A truthful version of that headline would be Get back into your office — the pension funds and commercial property giants that own the freehold on the office you despise need you.
Despite some tedious rhetoric about “the new normal” The Sunday Times writers are unable to truly consider a city centre remade to serve the people who live and work within it rather than the people who own it. They write, presumably with straight faces, that:
In the early stages of the Covid crisis, some said it was our social duty to keep city centres alive, leading to Twitter jokes about the joys of dying for one’s country. The debate on how to do this now needs to be treated seriously.
You can tell just how terrified the landlords and wider establishment are about the empty city centres by the fact that The Observer Magazine pushed exactly the same line, albeit with a layer of shoddily-applied lifestyle gloss on top.
The Observer front page trailed the delights of the magazine with a trio of experts who haven’t had to regularly go into an office in years: Eva Wiseman on “comfy clothes”, Jay Rayner extolling “the joys of the sandwich” and Phillippa Perry offering advice on “how to cope with other people”.
Inside, Rhik Sammader claims to “feel jealous of anyone returning to work this week”, Gaby Hinsliff admits at the top of her contribution that “it’s more than a decade now since [she] last worked full time in an office…”, Séamas O’Reilly similarly notes he “hasn’t worked in an office for three years”, Martin Love offers a hymnal to the cycle commute (“One of my great pleasures is finding new routes to do the same old trip…”) and Genevieve Fox takes on the topic of office dogs.
In her introduction to these mini-essays of mind-numbing mundanity and nostalgia for something that is firmly in most of the writers’ history, Emma Beddington wonders if returning to the office “might also be a chance for reinvention” before declaring “look our your lanyard — the office is back.”
On the opposite page, there’s a photo of a desk with a ‘Welcome Back’ balloon tied to the chair, an Employee of the Month March 2019 mug sat in a mouldering coffee ring, a Pret baguette and a dead plant. Even in the glossy world of the Sunday supplement, the true mundanity of office life must seep in.
I like Jay Rayner but reading him writing in all sincerity that we should “accept the uncomplicated joys of the pre-packaged sandwich” before calling it “the definition of civilisation” left me certain that a brain worm with significant property investments and a share portfolio heavily weighted towards Pret, city dry cleaners, and train station branches of WH Smith had crawled into his ear and taken control of his brain.
In The Times today, Libby Purves — whose office experience in the past couple of decades has been an occasional drop-in as a freelancer and the privileged position of radio presenter where things revolve around you — joins the orifice hours with a piece headlined Office life is much more than pets and perks.
After plenty of pontificating about companies offering perks, bribes and other desperate measures to get workers back into the office, Purves shifts into ludicrous poetry:
We humans are animals too, shedding pheromones, sharing air, evolved to read real faces and voices in real time. Moreover, we are herd creatures and enjoy the thundering stimulus of hooves galloping around us on a shared journey. A team is a cavalcade heading for the same success, sharing the glee of overcoming hurdles. But a workplace can also be the jungle pool at dusk where differences vanish in common need (remember those smoking balconies where the newest recruit could talk to the equally addicted boss?).
Most people’s experience of the office as “jungle pool at dusk” is one where they’re prey while bosses are the predators. Reaching for biological reasons why offices work makes sense is just a way of disguising a desire to see the status quo return, for concluding that because, as Purves did, you met your partner at the office, they are not simply grim pens but speed-dating with spreadsheets.
It’s all very reminiscent of billionaire’s son-in-law risky Rishi Sunak warning ‘young people’ that they should “go back to the office” before working from home “harms their career” earlier this summer and last year’s grim warnings that City centres ‘face disaster’ unless office staff return.
The blame is not placed on a Westminster government that offered a fraction of the support provided by other nations but workers whose insufficient commitment to over-stuffed trains, under-stuffed sandwiches, and bleak offices (no, a table tennis table doesn’t have magic powers).
Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that Times and Sunday Times owner and slowly disintegrating antipodean ancient Rupert Murdoch has large investments in real estate. I’m sure it has nothing to do with The Sunday Times writing its second “get back to the office!” leader of the summer. And newspapers desperate to get advertising spend rising again certainly don’t need to push consumers back into cities and a commuting cycle that makes them more inclined to convenience purchases. I’m sure it really is about the job prospects of sandwich shop workers.
In June, when The Sunday Times last turned its leader column over to begging on behalf of commercial landlords (Home working was a stopgap. Now let the office live again) the writers concluded:
What we cannot afford, as we learn to live with the virus, is to turn our city centres into ghost towns and large swathes of the workforce into a disparate army of kitchen-table loners.
Our great cities have survived wars, terrorist attacks and plagues. They must not be brought down by Covid and Zoom.
Whenever you see this kind of rhetoric in comment pieces, coupled with ‘nostalgic’ features about what the office has done for ‘us’, ask yourself who the “we” who cannot afford cities to change are and to whom the “our” in “our city centres” refers.
Columnists who can cosplay as office workers on an occasional trip into the newsroom find it easy to wax lyrical about the joys of the commute; they’re not sardined on a Southern Rail service daily or permanently sat next to the office’s most boring bastard.
The articles, leader columns, and columnist contributions on the joys of office aren’t about saving small businesses or ensuring the future of service industry and retail workers; they are acts of ventriloquism by proprietors with property portfolios, commercial landlords, and advertising departments desperate for forced spending to return.
We can only hope that orifice hours are over soon. I’m not sure how much longer I can cope with columnists’ talking out of their arses about what the office has done for us while sitting snug in their pyjamas.