Office Space



Office Space
Originally uploaded by tdouthat.

See the ugly shoes I have to wear to work. After working from home for most of the last four and a half years, I’m being forced to start working from the office again. I’m extremely annoyed by the situation. I took this particular position in June 2001 mostly because they said I could work from home. About two years into it, the policy changed and I was only allowed to work from home the weeks that I was oncall. For 6 months or more, I pretty faithfully worked 2 out of 3 weeks in theoffice. At some point I realized that no one really knew where I was. The people I worked with every day were in a different part of the country and dealt with me via the phone, instant messaging, and email. It made no difference to them where I was because they could always get hold of me and I was producing copious amounts of work.
That all changed last Friday. Suddenly it’s a big deal whether I’m sitting my dark little cubicle and wasting 2 hours a day commuting. Some manager several levels above me suffers from a unfortunate misunderstanding of the concept “synergies of co-location” so that anybody within an hour’s drive of one of our branches has to actually be in that office. It is apparently entirely beside the point that almost no one on my project is actually in that office and that I get substantially more done without the distractions of an office and the wasted time of commuting.
I’ve always hated the kind of people who threaten to quit when they don’t get their way, because it reeks of blackmail. The problem is that I used to love my job and now it just ticks me off. So what do I do? Quietly look for a different gig or try to fix this one through threats? There has to be a third option.

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