Editor’s note: Flyer writers will occasionally share this space.
The other day my Mac laptop started freezing up. I looked at its storage capacity and saw that it was more than 90 percent full, stuffed to near capacity with photos, documents, music, apps, and email files. I needed to offload some of that RAM-devouring content.
I began by deleting hundreds of photos, since they are on the iCloud, anyway. Next were thousands of old Word files, everything I’d written since 2015, most of it duplicated elsewhere. Also deleted were a couple dozen ancient apps — Chess, Stickies, Photo Booth, Lensa — all unused for years.
Then I really hit pay dirt: emails, thousands of them from 2010 to 2014. I’d transferred them to this computer from my old one for some reason. It was like finding a time capsule. All the pressing problems and issues and humor and humanity of that time brought back to life: Can we change the cover photo on the Weirich story? Is Branston’s column ready yet? Don’t forget, the annual 20<30 party is tomorrow night. Bianca put cupcakes on the Flyer table. Cashiola wants to have lunch about the size of the paper after the meeting.
As I scrolled, other names appeared that I hadn’t thought of in years — ad sales reps who didn’t make the grade, that weird receptionist who liked to use the intercom just a little too much, that snooty intern who dropped a milkshake on the front hall carpet and just kept walking. “That’s what janitors are for,” he said. Keep walking, we said.
It was a different time, a different culture. We ate lunch together, smoked on the back stairs together, stayed late when a story was breaking, ordered pizza and drank beer together on Tuesday after the paper went to the printer.
We hung out. We gossiped. And we emailed: What is going on with Rhonda’s hair? Is Phil getting divorced? What’s the deal with this new CFO? Is Donna P. wearing a f—king wig today? Are we getting a bonus this year? All this and more, captured for posterity in those long-forgotten office emails.
There were emails about snow days, which didn’t exist on Tuesdays because the paper had to get out, no matter what. There were Tuesdays when I picked up staffers from all over Midtown because I had a four-wheel-drive vehicle and used to live “up north.”
On days when school was called off, the office was filled with toddlers, as staffers brought their kids to work. The break room became a de facto kiddie lounge. We all knew the names of everyone’s kids. Most of them are in college or older now.
But the real email gold was the discovery of several issues of The Tattler, the now-defunct monthly company newsletter. It was written by senior editor Michael Finger, and to say he took liberties with the truth is, well, something of an understatement. The Tattler featured the expected office news, but it also featured long, rambling stories, very loosely based in truth, but mostly just created by Michael’s fertile imagination. No targets were spared. Once, the CEO had a fender-bender on the way to work. Not a big deal, you might think. But the story published in The Tattler featured ladies of the night (the Richardson twins), the deployment of 17 meticulously enumerated airbags, and the subsequent confinement of the CEO to a mental hospital with aluminum foil on the windows.
And no, Michael didn’t get fired. It was just business as usual for The Tattler. Everyone was fair game.
But those days are gone now, lost to the great office diaspora spawned by Covid. Millions of companies and businesses discovered they could produce their products with their employees working from home “remotely,” which is a perfect word for it. No more rent! Zoom became a noun, as in “I’ve got a Zoom at 10:30,” and now millions of us who once worked in offices mostly see our co-workers in little boxes on a computer screen.
An entire culture has vanished for millions of people. The office once was a congregation, a club, a family. People spent more daylight hours in their office than they did at home. Now, not so much. We take the change for granted because humans are nothing if not resilient. But something of value was lost and is unlikely to return.
