Home office or the real deal? It’s a question that has plagued the public discourse for most of the past two years, with people on both sides of the argument making some thoughtful points about the benefits of both. Going somewhere else for your job means that it’s a lot easier to separate life and work, and you get more of a chance to connect with your colleagues. Staying home, meanwhile, cuts out the hell that is the commute and allows you more flexibility to do things on your own terms.

As a long time WFH devotee, I am well aware of the joys of being able to clock in from your couch. Much of my weekday wardrobe consists of slightly jazzed up, pajama type items, and I can put the laundry out on my lunch break so I don’t have to do it in the evening. If I get lonely during the day, I just take five to stare lovingly at my plants. Failing that, I have a conversation with my inanimate work buddies, Corky and Corko (old wine corks that have faces drawn on them in Sharpie). 

It’s not a way of working that’s for everyone, but there are a lot of people who are missing it now that they’re having to make the transition back to the office. It doesn’t help that some places seem hellbent on rubbing it in that things are «back to normal». 

A thread started by @audrawilliams has revealed a particularly depressing example of this through some advertising in a Toronto office building. Gloating about all the things that workers were presumably leaving at home, Twitter was so outraged by the try-hard tirade against remote working that the company involved was forced to make an official response. That’s one way to push employees to write their resignation letters, I guess.