I went into my office yesterday for the first time in a few months to pick some stuff up. We got notified a couple of days ago to get any personal property out of the office before Thanksgiving or else it'd be thrown out, so I guess we're moving out of the office¹. It was a pretty eerie place to be; even now, eight months later, most people haven't been back and it kind of looks like the entire office was abducted by aliens in early March.

Despite how weird it is, I still miss working out of the office.

I miss having a clean delineation between "work" and "home".

I miss having copious desk space and a big monitor².

I miss the 48" TVs on the wall showing Grafana dashboards with key metrics so there was always ambient knowledge of what was going on with the product.

I miss having meetings in conference rooms where you can see other people and have a giant whiteboard to sketch on.

I miss casual collaboration. Video chat is a poor substitute and Slack is a deeply irritating tool that combines the worst aspects of synchronous and asynchronous communication.

I miss productivity! I think our³ engineering productivity has fallen through the floor since COVID despite everyone working longer and harder; I fundamentally do not think remote teams can ever be as productive as in-person teams.

I miss having my employer pay for electricity and heat and fast symmetric multi-gigabit Internet access instead of shifting those costs to me.

I miss having a plethora of convenient and delicious options for take-out lunch! I miss the gyros and french fries at Ayola. I miss the chicken pesto sandwich at Working Girls' Cafe. I miss the chow mein and pork buns from Yank Sing. I miss the katsu curry from Muracci's. I miss the curry burritos from Curry Up Now. I miss the croque monsieur from Cafe Madeline. I miss the $5 lunch specials from Mehfil.

I miss the succession of friendly baristas at our favorite coffee shop who always knew our orders and put up with our banter.

I miss occasional after-work drinks at the sky bar with the $18 well drinks that we always convinced management to pay for.

Hell, I miss BART in all its loud and smelly glory.

Look, I know, it's not all bad. It's a lot easier taking care of a baby while working from home than it would be if I were commuting 45 minutes each way every day. I'm spending a lot less money on food and coffee and BART. And I'm not arguing that we should be in the office now; not a single one of those things I listed above is worth the health risk of jamming 150 people⁴ into an open-plan office with a quasi-functional ventilation system⁵. But I really hope that office-work isn't a permanent victim of this pandemic, that all the companies pushing for permanent WFH to save a few bucks on rent reconsider their stances, and that there comes a time when I can go back to work again.