In some ways, 1997 was the last summer. I had finished school in May and had nothing lined up before September at the earliest. I took a job, then lost that job by spending a month and change in Ohio waiting for a different job to happen. It was the last time there was an open-ended period of summer without the daily obligation of doing something.
It was a transitional state, not unlike the summer of 1990, which in a way was even more thoroughly the last summer. I didn’t have a job that summer, because I was content to live off my graduation money (especially once I got my car stereo installed) and I was just killing time until the dream began when I started college. The big difference was that in 1990, I had an open-ended future full of possibility to dream of. In 1997, I was confused and bewildered and clinging to a thin reed of hope that the guy I kinda-sorta knew from the Internet would throw me a lifeline.
In retrospect, it feels like I must have been insane. I was flat broke, twelve hours drive from home, biding my time until I could hear back from my one job application in a completely different career field in a completely different city. I could no more do that now than I could fly to the moon under my own power, for all sorts of reasons – mostly revolving around the requirements of a mortgage and an unwillingness to abandon 26 years of experience to start from scratch in something else. But back then, with the entire past fallen down the chasm behind me and nothing to lose as the ground crumbled under my feet, I was willing to close my eyes and leap.
I guess that’s the problem. Everyone knows I hate my job, but I have reconciled myself to it. Or rather, had. Now they want me in the office again, and have offered no concessions on the prospect of five days a week – not the flexibility of a couple of work from home days that we had prior to the onset of COVID, not the possibility of relocating to an office that actually has people I routinely collaborate with and would profit by proximity to, and no sign whatsoever that my work is even noticed, let alone valued. It’s a one size fits all setting, and I’m the wrong size.
But what are the alternatives? Find a remote job somewhere else? No one in this valley is hiring people to do what I do, as far as I can tell, and the ones that are want to hire remote workers all right – in Seattle, or Atlanta or Dallas or somewhere considerably cheaper. Which means finding a remote job in another part of the world is going to mean a pay cut that I can’t really afford. So either way, stay or go, it means back to an office and a commute.
And then we’re back to my oldest friend, the devil I know — and the fact that right now I still know how to do the job, have institutional knowledge, and still get enough vacation to try to live the life I want outside the office. And maybe I can use the downtime and the slow days stuck in a cube to actually study and pursue other work, instead of distracting myself with the laundry and the dishes and the trash and recycling and the occasional errands.
I don’t know. The dream of wiring remote goes back to the very beginning of my career, on a drive through New England when it occurred to me that the combination of home broadband and UNIX might make it possible to work from home somehow. Work from home was a key desire by ten years later, and last year, it caused me to turn down a contract offer that would have paid more money even though the daily commute was barely ten miles round trip. I’m not fool enough to count on the possibility of retirement, but for the last three years, I’ve been able to get close enough that I can live with it.
So much in this life is open-ended uncertainty. I’m waiting to hear back on the recall of my car. I’m waiting to hear back on the part for the new hot tub we’ve never been able to use. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop on a legal matter that has been in limbo for eight months with no prospect of closing the book. We might not even live in a democracy by this time two years from now. All I want is the basic assurance that I have been doing a good job for the last three and a half years, and will be allowed to continue doing it as I have done on the condition that I keep doing a good job. That doesn’t strike me as an exceptional, outrageous, privileged or extravagant ask.
But that’s not how the world works any more.