Victorians should be allowed to return to office buildings immediately, writes Patrick Carlyon

A staged return to offices made sense in October, but now the reason for the delay no longer exists.

Victorians should be allowed to return to the office at once. Picture: Mark Stewart

There is a compelling reason why we should all be allowed to return to the office at once.
It’s this: there is no reason not to.

The virus is conquered, at least for now, after our year of living passively.

A staggered return to work is set for the new year. Half of private company workforces can return from January 11. Up to half of the public sector return from February 8.

But why wait? Why not return last week? After all, the reason for not going no longer exists.

If we were wrenched into hibernation, why can’t we be wrenched out of it?

Some people remain scared of public transport.

Yet public transport is safe, even if the passenger alongside you wolfs down four dimmies and sneezes at you the entire trip. You might catch soy sauce stains, but you won’t catch the virus.

A staged return made sense in October, when no new cases became the new normal.

And even in November, perhaps, when the good news continued to exceed the bad.

But the timing appears to have been shaped by unexpected factors.

City businesses that rely on office workers are struggling with the reduced foot traffic. Picture: Tim Carrafa

In defiance of a return to work has been a counter-movement, described as a kind of awakening. This work-from-home buzz has received enormous coverage this year.

It’s a plus, we’re told, which frees us of the dreariness of getting to work, and of being stranded there when other things, such as attending to children, seem like better priorities in a work-home day.

Working at home, we’re told, is progress out of crisis.

True, some benefits are manifest. I am typing this at 10.47am, unshowered and in my dressing gown. I am diving into my fifth coffee and staring, blankly, as the dog murders a sock she kidnapped from the laundry basket.

In another part of the house, a child is trying to assemble an exercise bench. He wears the universal expression that applies to an IKEA flat pack.

There is swearing. His hour set aside will become three or four. Bits intended for the final construction will mysteriously be left over.

He needs a wrench, he says.
I tell him he needs a miracle, then return to writing, once I’ve made another coffee, checked share prices, researched cars online and scheduled a shower.

Only 25 per cent of office workers are allowed back at the moment. Picture: David Crosling

I don’t have to present, smell fresh, or face the ramp queues on the Monash Freeway.

But the separation of work — and home — has become blurred. The distinction matters a lot for many of us, for whom productivity and distraction are like oil and water.

The accepted norms of going to work have been questioned under lockdown.

Surveys have sprung up faster than spring weeds.

Why have everyone scramble at about the same time to arrive? People can make home work,
we keep hearing. They prefer it. Three days of work at home a week, they say, thanks very much.

This blue-sky thinking speaks of less traffic. It goes that the rat race has been disengaged, by necessity, and now most of us don’t want to return to what was.

Yet there is no one size fits all. Some workers are super-organised, adept at juggling tasks, focused on cue and impervious to the growling of the damned dog.

They are quoted in media stories about the wonders of home work. They have taken barista courses and guitar lessons.

These new evangelists are just as productive at home, we’re told, and they are freed of the daily commute.

Then, there are the rest of us.

We don’t manage random interruptions terribly well. We feel shrunken by all the time at home rather than liberated. We inflate to the pulse of an office, where blenders are banned, as are children who wander about and bump into things because they stare at screens.

We are the forgotten people, the lost souls who need a reason to get dressed in the morning.
We feel more encumbered, not less. In the absence of structure, we slide into torpor. We don’t do new courses; we watch more TV and forget to shave.

We feel deprived by the isolation. We don’t like Zoom meetings, and resent the formalising of work practices that once happened by osmosis. We crave normal. Not “COVID-normal”, but the rhythms of an earlier age, where you mocked the coffee guy who barracks for Carlton, and chatted with the lady at the front desk about the weather.

There is no reason why we can’t have these things. Sure, tinker with times and flexibility. But haven’t we suffered long enough?

We need to go back to work. Why protract the dislocation and deprivation any longer?

PATRICK CARLYON IS A HERALD SUN COLUMNIST