The Times Magazine 7SPINAL COLUMN
MELANIE REID
‘Who’d want to
WFH full-time?
I’d give my heart
to be back at
my messy desk
in the office’
can’t understand why people aren’t
camping covertly on the pavement
outside their offices, like bargain-
hunters at Boxing Day sales, ready
to stampede the doors. But lots of
workers claim they want to carry on
WFH full-time, even after it’s safe to
return. Give them a couple of years,
I say, and they’ll be begging for a
security pass and three days a week.
Going to work is a massive privilege. Above
all, it means you inhabit two worlds, which is
one more than lots of people. You can cross
from one you to the other you, leaving space in
between. Even if it’s a rubbish job, it represents
somewhere other. Having two identities makes
you richer: with two sets of friends, clothes,
environments, challenges. Two different
vocabularies and bits of brain to use.
It’s an enrichment I took for granted.
God, I even miss the commuting – the gaps
dovetailing the day, which belonged to me
alone. Time to reflect, zombify, change
identities, gear up or down.
Take away the change, variety, human
contact and stimulation, surreptitious eyerolls
and gossip of the office, and... Well, look at us
all trapped and fraying at the edges. We need
the sun to come up again.
My office dawn never came. I hoped that
with progress I might return to my old job
after my accident; I spent ages calculating how.
But it would have placed impossible demands
on everyone: carers arriving at 5am on thepremise that I didn’t feel like a corpse, which is
a 50:50 call most mornings. I would have done a
day’s work before I got to the office. I’d need a
slave to help me out of my car, park it, and work
a keyboard at high speed on my behalf. Even
without jumping into taxis to go to interview
people, the stress would have killed me.
I’m not sure what I missed most. It might
have been the secret packet of chewing gum
in my desk, a lost vice. Maybe it was the names
and extension numbers, addresses and random
useful lists taped to the wall beside me, a
Schott’s Almanac of facts so I didn’t have to
look anything up. My knowledge wallpaper.
Maybe it was my drawers that spoke of
another life: mascara, lipstick, car keys,
lanyards, business cards and tape recorders
full of long forgotten voices giving quotes that
mattered a lot at the time. Or even just the
famous yellow Post-it Note my boss had
stuck to my screen: “Melanie, your desk is
a health hazard.”
My desk was a shrine to busyness and
action. Someone capable lived there, and it
was me. I’d give my heart to be back in that
messy kingdom, full of anarchy and creativity
and the tyranny of deadlines, with rolling news
and phones ringing and all 200 deafening
decibels of my bombastic colleague Angus
opposite, drilling some hapless politician.
Nip out at lunchtime and there were
imaginative sandwiches to buy – ooh, the
thought – made not by me. There were friends
and contacts to catch coffee with, the nuanceof office politics to absorb, bosses to engage
with face to face.
I miss the laughter; the company of
black-hearted, cynical, razor-sharp journalists;
the addictive energy of daily news, the
adrenaline of deadlines, the endorphins that
fed me all the way home. How can anyone not
want to go back to work? Who seeks the calm
and detachment that creates hermits?
But dear colourful Angus, the original
howling Gael, is dead now, his erudition and
drama lost. Even now, when political news
breaks in Scotland, I miss phoning him for the
inside story. But I’m dead too, a mere spectator
of the old world we shared.
I did try to go back. About ten months
after my accident, my occupational therapist
escorted me from the spinal unit to the office
to test the possibility. It was unbelievably
exhausting. Shaky inside and out, I knew I’d
never do it on my own.
But I visited, briefly, my Mary Celeste desk, a
time capsule abandoned one Thursday evening.
Someone had swept the crumbs, emptied the
contents of my drawers into a crate. I looked
inside and realised that all my stuff was
worthless clutter. Maybe that’s why, for me,
the office felt like going back after Chernobyl,
post-nuclear. Maybe everyone will get a
fleeting sense of that, before they reset anew. n@Mel_ReidTimes
Melanie Reid is tetraplegic after breaking her
MURDO MACLEOD neck and back in a riding accident in April 2010