I was starting in on the month in review post for this month and, in the section for five years ago I was reminded that it was the start of the bad days of Covid.

I was at the office on Monday, March 16, 2020 when notifications started appearing that Santa Clara County would enter a lock down and that everybody save for essential workers were to stay at home.

I haven’t been back to the office on a regular basis since.  I haven’t even had an office or a cube since the summer of 2020 when the company I was working for at the time let the lease on our office expire and we all went over, one by one with masks on, to clear out our desks.

That happened to coincide with the big fires in Santa Cruz County, where my office was located on the dead elf burial ground once known as Santa’s Village (or the old Borland campus, for those who know Silicon Valley lore), so that not only was there risk of disease transmission, but there was also hot ash landing on the parking lot, covering cars in a gray mantle if they sat too long.

For me the change was significant, but not as overwhelming as it was to some.  By that point I had been working with teams overseas or in different US time zones for almost two decades and I was working from home a day or two a week already, so I had myself setup.

For others it was a chore… and then there were the “essential workers” who were not allowed to stay home.  As always, retail workers bore the brunt of this.  You can’t close Costco or the grocery store or Home Depot or McDonald’s… or the Hospital.  And while I appreciate the risks to which medical staff were subjected, they are also trained and mostly equipped to deal with contagion.  I don’t want to minimize their sacrifice, but the cashier at Safeway behind the wobbly sneeze shield somebody just bolted to their check stand, they were kind of left to their own devices.

Also, here in Silicon Valley, a couple of tech firms decided nobody should get to stay home and branded everybody “essential workers” and even had legal write up “essential worker” statements to carry with them.

Eventually everybody who could work from home was doing so… and for a lot of us, it was fine.  I used to sit in an office next to my boss and would just step around the door frame to update him on things or ask questions, a very convenient situation.  I had to get used to some form of IM… which at the company I was working for at the time, a conglomeration of acquisitions, meant Slack, Teams (both Microsoft and Cisco), as well as some internal contraption.  It was often easier to just send an email.  There was an attempt to route our phones to a Cisco soft phone, but that was mostly a wasted effort.

A lot of companies noticed that productivity didn’t change.  We were in the midst of downsizing our office and had just signed a lease on a new location… but the company decided it was still cheaper to not bother standing it up and try to sublet it than to get us moved over.

Then I was laid off because West had been purchased by a second tier capital management group that was good at trying to look smart about strategic vision and branding and press releases, but not very good at actually making products.  I heard from a friend that they tossed out the grand new product plan I had started working on… which was an objectively bad idea built on several additional objectively bad ideas, all of which I could have provided historical proof of their badness if anybody had asked… and have gone back to churning out custom code written by devs in NotePad++ or VI because nobody in management has a clue as to how to run a software organization.

Whatever.  If you haven’t been laid off in Silicon Valley you have been very lucky.

I was then hired by the state for a 100% telework position, because the state too was keen to save money on building leases.  In 2022 they were very happy to have people working from home and let go a bunch of office space in downtown Sacramento and other locations.  But most of the main functions of the state happen in Sac or its vicinity.  If there is an interesting looking place in Sac, the state probably has a lease on at least some of it, like The Ziggurat, where DGS lives.

Most places settled down into a new routine.  My car now sits in the driveway most days.  I am now one of those people who drive a couple days a week at most… though that is enabled by my wife, who does get out and drive most days for work.  But vehicular usage has been down.

Also, traffic on SF Bay Area freeways was noticeably reduced, traffic being high on everybody’s quality of life issues for the region, and with it pollution.  Things were pretty good for a bit.

Then came the backlash.

The commercial real estate people were angry from the get go, and grumbling to anybody who would listen about how they underpin the financial well being of the region or some nonsense.  We have a problem where it is crazy easy to build new commercial offices, but housing is a huge pain (and in short supply), so they opted for offices and were now stuck with a lot of empty offices.

But it was really the then mayor of Sacramento who got the ball rolling for the state, blaming city woes on state workers not spending their lunch money downtown and demanding that the state get everybody commuting back to the office full time to support his constituents.  The state in general, and state workers in particular, were obligated in his opinion to spend their money downtown.

This got the local paper to run stories about this regularly and put pressure on the governor to say that maybe state workers should be back in the office two days a week.

And then our governor, who has ambitions to be president, started looking to raise funds for that 2028 venture, on the not entirely certain assumption that there will be a presidential election in 2028, and this was the opportunity that the commercial real estate robber barons were looking for.  Gavin gets their money and support if he puts state workers back in the office.

So the governor put out an executive order saying that all state workers will be in the office four days a week starting on July 1, 2025.  Good fucking luck with that.  Part of this was also prompted by the current administration laying off federal workers en masse, so the governor has overtly suggested that they can replace any state workers who put up a fuss with some newly unemployed former federal workers, of which there are more than a few in Sac.

This is all akin to what is going on in tech in general, where big companies have decided they want everybody back in the office for a variety of vague reasons which often sum up to the fact that the boss doesn’t feel like the boss unless he can look over your shoulder or see you in your cloth covered box at 10pm still working.

Ha ha… that last one was a joke, the boss is never there at 10pm.  Or if he is, it is because he didn’t get there until well after noon.  Zuckerberg famously doesn’t like to commit to anything until the afternoon, petulantly complaining about heads of state who get him a time slot in the morning.  Then again, Facebook was also pretty famous for being against employees having a home life at all.

If you aren’t in the office how can the boss tell if you’re getting in your 60 hours a week, which is what Sergey Brin has espoused as the latest panacea to make all that cash dumped into building AI pay off.  Just work harder dammit!  And do so in your cloth covered box so the company can make sure you’re not goofing off!

That is, of course, the conceit, that somehow employees never goof off at the office.  Leaving aside the amount of wandering around you can do and access to phones and other distractions, a computer is the ultimate “look busy” accessory.  I once sat at work raiding the City of Brass as a healer in TorilMUD while people came and went from my cube.  I mean, that is extra stealthy, because scrolling text just looks like work, even if it is full of ANSI color, but still.

Now the push is on to get everybody back in the office, including at the state.  We’re in a budget crisis in California… we have two modes out here, crisis or surplus and nothing in between… but DGS is hard at work in the Ziggurat trying to find office space for all the state employees.

So traffic is worse, pollution is worse, people are grumpy, the union is up in arms (I am a union member), and the governor isn’t going to get a lot of votes from state workers.  He can certainly count on me not supporting him, though I have many more reasons to dislike him.

But the state also moves at its own pace… and has to move budget around to find the money for these new buildings.  And we cannot even get back the downtown building that we once supported, so the mayor of Sac can go suck a lemon.  We’ll be out in the suburbs or down in Elk Grove.  Hell, the Ziggurat isn’t even in Sac proper, but in West Sac, which is in Yolo County.

As such, I seem safe for the moment from RTO.  (I suppose I should be happy to have a safe job given the president seems dead set on crashing the economy.)  There won’t be a seat for me in the office… in any office… any time soon.  But I honestly don’t think the governor cares whether people actually get back to the office any more than he believes his rationalization for ordering the move.  He was fully in support of work from home when saving taxpayer dollars was the concern.  Now he is fully in support of RTO because he sees political advantage in that.