Many are missing the office craic
ASURVEY from Utility Bidder says 63% of office workers have missed the company of colleagues whilst working from home during lockdown.
One said: “Working from home has been fine and I’ve surprised myself with just how much work I’ve managed to get done. But it’s been three months now and to be honest, I miss the company of my team at the office.”
It’s 14 years since I left an office setting, when I retired full time from the Examiner and began to contribute this column from home, but I can understand the chap’s point of view.
Most of my time at the Examiner I was off-diary, finding my own stories when I was community relations reporter, and latterly when I became a feature writer and then a columnist about 35 years ago. A lot of the time throughout my career, I was absent from a desk and typewriter – in courts, out on the job, travelling. But the office was a base with genuine camaraderie, staffed with like-minded people with whom to enjoy the newsroom craic and go to the pub at lunchtime or for a five o’clock drink.
The last 14 years I’ve worked from home, most of my contemporaries have retired, and my newsroom craic consists of phone calls to old colleague Mike Shaw, former Examiner journalist and editor of the Colne Valley Guardian.
Journalism has changed and I’ve often said the period from when I started, at the Knutsford Guardian in 1958 until full time retirement in 2006, was the golden age. I’m comfortable working from home where I have an office in which I spend most days, but I have missed that camaraderie, the characters that all offices produce, working as a team with a photographer or other reporters, and the bonding sessions in the pub with colleagues, police officers and select councillors.
Office life will soon get back to normal when lockdown ends. Sadly, for me, it will be self-isolation as usual. Everybody say aaah.