Love the bants in an office, yeah. Love a stilted, awkward joke in the kitchen. Love when a conversation starts about something political and you sink down in your chair and try to block out the absolute fucking nonsense floating through the air. https://twitter.com/RachelConnoll14/status/1299315354360000513

Love feeling guilty for taking a shit. Love arguing about the air conditioning. Love that one person whose toxicity absolutely sucks the air out of the room and ruins the whole day.

Love passive aggressive e-mails. Love enforced camaraderie over someone bringing in a fucking cake. Love basically inventing stuff to do because you do anything that's worth doing first thing then have to fill the rest of the 9-5 with busywork.

Offices are mostly just somewhere to *be* for a bit to justify others doing actual productive work to keep you in shirts.

"Don't you miss talking to other people?"

Mate, have you *had* a conversation in an office? It has the same relationship to meaningful human interaction that a hermetically sealed package of luminous orange cheese slices has to actual cheddar.

Processed, enveloped in an insulating layer of plastic, modular in a way that is vaguely unsettling, synthetic in colour and texture. A memory of a real thing, arrived at through a series of perfectly logical transformations, yet now resembling is starting point in no way.

Rote phrases repeated. Static relationships. An endless, low-level murmur of noncommittal platitudes. You meet one person a year who you connect with more than superficially; they're always a temp whose spirit is still to be broken.

Christ. 10 years we worked in an office. What a colossal waste of time and energy for all concerned.

Think of all the conversations and meetings. Think of all the *stuff* we did that seemed so vital at the time but now means absolutely nothing to anyone.

Even when we did effect meaningful change - and once, we demonstrably saved our department some tens of thousands of pounds in outside consultation fees through our willingness to learn some simple database skills - managerial politics prevented it working out to our benefit.