I’m going out of my mind keeping the home fires (not) burning

SLOWLY but surely, it seems people are returning to the office. A survey of Irish employers this week suggests that 44% of staff are now working fully from the office, while another 41% are following a hybrid model, splitting their time between their work and their remote desk (or ‘home’ as we used to call it).

Statistics and studies suggest that in spite of three years of workers enjoying the benefits of working from home, we’ve been creeping relentlessly back towards the office since the end of the pandemic. Some of it is employer-led – the same survey reveals 38% of bosses would rather have workers spend more time in the building – but the gradual return to work is also coming from employees who, for some baffling reason, would rather wear clothes and shoes to work than sit in their dressing gown and slippers all day. Even those who work for themselves seem to be in a hurry to leave the house. Cycling along the Grand Canal in town the other day, I was struck by how many of the gleaming new buildings are devoted to individual desk spaces.

Inevitably, this post-pandemic work trend has thrown up some new jargon. ‘Coffee badging’, I was intrigued to read this week, is a growing phenomenon in workplaces whereby people show up at the office, conspicuously bring a coffee to their desk, and then make a beeline for the exit. I suppose it’s the Gen Z equivalent of leaving your jacket on the back of your chair in some dusty civil service office and then taking yourself to the pub until going home time.

Anyway, as somebody who chose to work from home back when it was still called that, more than 25 years ago, I didn’t think this new business had anything to do with me. But events this past week have suddenly seen me question my work ‘model’ and, to be honest, my sanity.

For the first time since I decided to see if I could hold down a job and bring up a family without childcare, I have been on my own. For years, my desk (or my ‘kitchen table,’ to give it its more familiar title) was surrounded by babies, then toddlers, then school children. Later, college students flitted in and out and around my daily work schedule – which, I am now realising, was increasingly punctuated by my complaining loudly about people in the house turning on the central heating and then leaving the room. Bear with me here, this becomes relevant.

Time moves on and children grow up and move out and most days now, it’s only me and my youngest at home. But last week, she went to London for a few days. Did I celebrate by going full Ferris Bueller and sitting around in my underwear and sunglasses with the thermometer turned up to tropical, pretending to be more productive than I am? Did I f***.

INSTEAD, left to my own devices, I switched off the heating completely, pulled on my warmest geansaí and socks and plugged in a small portable radiator which I wheeled ahead of me into whichever room I needed to be in.

Now, I don’t know if you noticed this, but it’s been very, very cold these past few days. If ever there was a time to be flaithiúlach with the boiler, this has been it. Honestly, I can’t explain why I didn’t. Just as I can’t explain why – without a single judgmental eye on me – I chose to continue eating the remains of the Christmas turkey, frozen into individual portions, and literally the only thing I’ve had for dinner since December 25. I could have raided my daughter’s Christmas chocolate stash. I could have coated myself in crisps, left behind by my other children. I am not short of money: I could have bought a takeaway. My God, I could have done anything.

Instead, I embarked on a lifestyle that I’m now genuinely worried will end with heartbreaking headlines about an elderly woman found frozen to death while sitting on a ‘secret cash pile’.

Is it an Irish mammy thing? I don’t know. But for everybody’s sake, I think it might be time for me to get coffee cadging and return to the workplace. In a centrally heated workspace, at least no one can hear me scream.