And as it turns out, having discussed the above act of what I thought was naughtiness with a number of friends, I appear to be late to this particular party. Basically, they’ve all been at this kind of thing for weeks. I was happy to cease working from home: to get back to the halcyon days of wearing shoes, running for tubes and dropping a tenner of my hard-earned in Pret before even sitting down at my desk. Only in hindsight does it seem obvious that when I did — before lots of others did — I found I was coming back from lunch each day to a flurry of emails that were suddenly, shall we say, more outspoken in tone.
Which, given ‘outspoken’ is far preferable to email’s natural state of passive aggression, is more than fine. In fact it’s one of many, many advantages beyond the obvious ones of: restaurants being fuller, for longer; everybody eating an actually substantial meal (remember that?) before heading to the pub; everybody running out of steam on weeknights around midnight rather than 2am and getting a full-ish night’s sleep; everybody, essentially, being much, much happier.
Basically those two years of working from home have made Londoners much, much more secure with the business of operating remotely. Pre-pandemic, getting a work call on a Friday afternoon when you’d told everyone you were at home but were actually in the pub — still working, but in the pub — would have been cause to scan the bar, paranoid that the guy who keeps looking over might be an envoy sent by your superiors. Now? There’s a prevailing sense, albeit still unofficially, that so long as one gets the job done and doesn’t do it every day, the occasional afternoon WFP (pub) or WFR (restaurant) or WFW (wherever) is okay. Beneficial for all, even.
Time was when you could take off at midday and not bother coming back to your desk. Time is when you can do exactly the same thing, except better.
