I Have Worked At Home For 25 Years And Visited An Office For The First Time.

Here are 5 things that surprised me.

• I went to an office for the first time, and some things surprised me as someone who works at home.

• The office seemed to be busier and a little more hectic than my home. It wasn’t as busy as I thought it would be, but this might be due to the pandemic.

• On the other hand, I saw people there who seemed to be doing pretty much what I do (working on their computers at desks). The main difference: they were all doing it at once in the same general area.

  

  getty images

  1. There's a “more than one person there” aspect to the office that I'm not used to as a person that works at home.

getty images

As a person who works at home, I've quickly learned it's nearly impossible to see someone in my house during the day. For example, when I make the quick trip from my bedroom office to the kitchen or bathroom and back, it’s virturally unheard of that I’ll see another person.

In the office I visited, that wasn't the case. When I walked through the office, for example, I saw people. Sometimes they were alone, sometimes they were in pairs. Sometimes there were even large groups of people, involved in something generally referred to as a meeting.

2. Someone cleans the bathroom in an office who is not me

getty images

I have noticed that if no one cleans the bathroom at my office (at home) it does not get clean. Also I have only one bathroom from which to choose. At the office I visited, there were lots of lots of bathrooms but no one I talked to working at the desks cleans these bathrooms. Then when I was in the bathroom once I finally saw something that made it all make sense: a person cleaning the bathroom whose job it was to do this. This is very different from what I have experienced.

getty images

3. There seems to be a greater emphasis on getting lunch in an office than there is for me, who does not work in an office.

getty images

Around noon in an office you might hear people start to say things like “Hey, I’m going go get some lunch.”  The closest thing you’d experience in my home is the dog jumping down from the bed and then scratching on the door that she needs to go outside and then I’d maybe get a yogurt while I was up. Granted, this is not the same as another person suggesting getting a meal together or even just grabbing sandwiches (or salads) together to eat while back at work. I’m only bringing it up to contrast those two experiences while also acknowledging that they both involve another person/dog doing something that might lead you to get up from your desk. On the other hand, I do think it’s important to acknowledge that letting a dog out and getting a yogurt (or not) is pretty different than going to get lunch with a person. 

“Ruthie” By author

4. Offices have coffee makers, too, but people use them all day.

Ok, first of all, because downtown areas are home to a lot of coffee shops, both hip spots where you can get a trendy pour-over or more basic chains like Starbucks, I just assumed no one ever makes coffee in an office. I couldn't have been more wrong. Offices have lots of coffee makers. I poured myself a cup at one office to see what it was like to drink a cup of coffee in an office and found that it was pretty similar to drinking one at home, except of course you might say “hey” to someone also getting coffee in an office.

What was a bit of an eye-opener was when I asked people in the office I visited if this was something they did a lot, and they said it was. They said sometimes they even have a cup or a few in the afternoon, which is not something I generally do, though I don’t know if that’s because I don’t work in an office, or just my personal preference, or, possibly, has something to do with the pandemic.

5. A surprising similarity: There’s not really anyone around in an office to save you from your bad ideas.

   

As someone who works alone, I find one of my biggest challenges is if I come up with a stupid fucking idea, there is literally no one to prevent me from writing it up and publishing it. There are no safeguards against me putting my absolute all into something that turns out to be an embarassing waste of time what results in me making a complete ass out of myself.

I've heard some people say that in offices people talk to each about their ideas and this really helps reduce the chances that projects are incomprehensibly dumb. Some of my family members have even gone as far as to say that offices are a great way to reduce the risk that something you wrote would be so bizarrely devoid of substance that people would wonder if it was real. I had no reason not to believe them. Well, once again, I could not have been more wrong.

Here’s an example: I heard someone in an office say to a colleague, “I’d like to write a 2000-word feature comparing two large American cities with another larger American city.”

Since I was visiting an office for the first time, I was obviously excited to see an interaction like this, to hear the colleague say “No, that’s a bad idea.” Instead they said, “That is a great idea. Don’t forget to express shock that a city at roughly the same latitude as another is similarly hot in the summer.”

So this is an instance where working at home and working at an office are pretty much the same, except that the person who came up with the bad idea and the person who said yes to it in the office are two different people and in my case, were this to happen, it would involve just one person—me! 

getty images