Lights, Camera, Zoom!

I Miss The Office

“I Miss The Office!” and I don’t even know why I just said that or why I would think that. This may be coming from some untapped hubris or a classic case of “careful what you ask for?!?!”; but, it’s good to be around people and not sequestered to an “office” (broom closet) in my home. Remote working, hybrid working, teleworking, and all the other monikers to describe not physically showing up at the office is creating a rift between management and teams. Working remotely makes total sense for my current work. Jamie Dimon doesn’t think so for his people at JP Morgan. He made some waves for being admittedly anti-remote work and I sympathize with him where most people demonize him. Dimon said, “You learn so much from people” when collaborating in the same room. I totally agree with Dimon on this point, but I’m not sure that Dimon really knows what people in the office actually do all day? They shop online, text their friends, chit chat with co-workers, go to meetings, and occasionally get some real work done. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced that Starbucks employees are to go back to the office for three days a week. The company is changing its policy because of culture, fairness and a need to correct “the unintended consequences that have emerged from conducting so much of our work virtually.” In short, “Y’all messed this up!”.

Admittedly, being driven in a team dynamic is what I miss most now that i’m working remotely. I miss white boarding ideas. I miss sitting in a windowless conference room with co-workers eating their lunch (and chewing with their mouths open). I miss the nasty inside of the office microwave and the strange smells emanating from the refrigerator. I worked with a gentleman who had an extra large pizza delivered every Monday and each day at lunch would eat a 1/4 of the pizza but leave that big cardboard pizza box on top of everyone else’s stuff in the fridge until the last 1/4 was consumed on Thursday. On Friday he ordered a salad. I miss that guy too. I miss trying to saw through a bagel with a plastic knife because the person who brought the bagels did not have the foresight to have the bagels sliced at the bagel shop. I even miss the person that would take it upon themselves to cut all the donuts in half in the name of limiting our sugar intake. I miss my making magic from all the hidden treasures in my condiment drawer. Many neo fusion dishes have been created from that pantry in my desk drawer. I want to go back to the office because I may have lost my ability to navigate all the ticks, norms, nuances, land mines, and taboos since I’ve been gone for so long. Maybe the office was truly awful and I’ll sober up real fast after the first week back in the office, but I still want to know how everyone came out of the pandemic. What happened to the pizza guy?

2019: A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings

The idea behind The Butterfly Effect is that a butterfly flaps it’s wings and a typhoon happens on the other side of the world. I was traveling in Greece that summer and noticed that my Greek passport was expiring in 2020. Honestly, I never look at these things. I was in the provincial town in Ioannina that day so I went to the police station to get a passport application, had my photo taken at a local photography shop, paid the application fee, and two weeks later I had a new passport. Little did I know, that action changed that trajectory of my career. I continued working in the office through February 2020 and I went to Los Angeles for work in late February and remember how the severity of the coronavirus was moving from regional concerns to a national pandemic. My boss Damian had tickets to the LAFC match and he made the decision to sell them just hours before the match. Looking back, that was the right call. On the way back from Los Angeles, I stopped in Chicago. On the plane, almost everyone was wiping their seats down and people were starting to wear masks and latex gloves. When I arrived in Chicago, it looked like Mardi Gras was going on. I didn’t see any masks or any precautions being taken. I arrived in Milwaukee and my desperate pleas to my parents to stay vigilant fell on deaf ears. Losing my parents to this virus was a thought I could not shake. A few weeks later, everything came to a halt and within a month my salary was cut and I was applying for PPP funds to keep our lights on and our team together.

2020: Adaptation

It’s all a bit blurry now, but being in my parents’ house (both retirees) during the pandemic was meant to help them navigate this new world. I didn’t let any of my brothers come over to our hermetically sealed home for a few weeks while we were figuring this thing out. My new “office” lacked any form of professionalism. I was embarrassed to turn on my webcam. The “office” looked like someone duct taped it all together. I took my zoom calls in the bedroom, worked at the kitchen table throughout the day while fielding constant questions from my parents on all trivial matters. It was the most stressful work environment I have ever worked in. After work, I would strap on my boots and walk three miles (rain or snow) to the Kwik Trip to make sure my dad had his SuperCash lottery tickets and bananas for his morning oatmeal or I would never hear the end of it. All my friends from high school that lived in the area were facing the same challenges. We all needed an outlet, but since we were all caring for elderly people, we were all very cautious and felt anxious and responsible. Hindsight being 50/50, I would now submit that our elderly parents fared better than us during this period. I feel pretty bad taking my parents temperatures everyday and keeping a log of it.

As the days were getting longer and spring was on the horizon, we all started to meet up and go on long bike rides. Everyone of us were weathered veterans from the banana bread baking, arts & crafts, toilet paper hoarding lives we lead over the past few months. My brother George was my lifeline to the outside world and my rock. This guy welcomed a new baby into the world and went to work everyday. Since he had a membership to Costco, I needed to stockpile alcohol at the most economical way possible. I figured a 1.75L of Tito’s vodka and a few cases of beer could get me through the lockdown. Nope! It got me through only two weeks and my brother cut me off for my own good. Bulk alcohol purchases meant bulk alcohol consumption, because my long lost college friends and I were doing online game nights and tempering the boredom and insanity with vodka. The bars were slowly opening up around town, but my friends and I were still all too spooked to go into them and resorted to grabbing a few beers and hanging out in the park, by the river, back alleys or any place associated with vagrancy.

July 2020 – Prison Break

International travel was extremely limited at that time. However, the mindless act of renewing my Greek passport in 2019 was my golden ticket out. My mom celebrated her 70th birthday that year and I left the day after her party. Due to the uncertainty of what I would find in Greece, I packed a lot of camping gear to pursue remote places and solitude.

I arrived in Greece and immediately established myself in the village, but people were too spooked to engage me on the street the first couple of weeks until I was in the clear. Internet was scarce and limited to buying expensive air cards. The first task was to get a fixed line to the house. Greece is not known for its efficiencies and “expedited” is a non-existent word. In order to bring internet to the house, I would need to bring a pole and pay for it myself. This act cost me 1,034 euros and my company alowed me to expense half of it as a thanks for taking a salary cut before the PPP program kicked in. In the two months it took to get that pole to the house and the internet connected, I spent close to 250 euros buying data for all the zoom calls. To distract from the constant offerings to the internet gods, I started a garden and planted some fruit trees. It was all worth it in the end, since I established a connection to the outside world and became more connected to the natural world on my escapes to remote beaches on the weekends.

April 2023 – A Star Is Born

This past August I was in Athens with my boss Damian and I told him we should go check out the Kerameikos neighborhood and get a Souvlaki at Elvis. We’ve talked about getting set up with an apartment/office in Athens for a while. He became inspired with the neighborhood, but I would’ve preferred Kipseli as a base of operations. Within three days we found an apartment Kerameikos and signed a lease. We found out that apartments in Athens do not include appliances so we had to purchase refrigerators, stoves, etc. Then there is the matter of turning on electric service, water, and internet. Over the next six months, he and I went back and forth from Athens filling in the gaps and now we are now fully operational with access to our friends in Ikaria and my family in Anthocori. I was so fortunate to be able to travel/work over the past 2 weeks in Corfu, Athens, and Ikaria. Having an apartment in Athens allows us to leave things in the apartment so we don’t have to allows be with luggage in tow.