Things I don’t miss about working in an Office

I don’t ever look back to the office. Perhaps because it didn’t suit me at that stage of my life. Perhaps I never found a boss or a company that was willing to give me the chance to be trained in something more.

I graduated university, worked in Auckland and Singapore, I spent many years working in various jobs – bookkeeping, marketing, admin. Working in an office never felt ‘right’.

Here’s 5 things that I do not miss at all about the office workspace.

1. Pointless meetings that could’ve been an email.

Working from home wasn’t a thing until covid hit. Zoom didn’t become popular until mid-2010’s. I only started using it in Singapore, when a lot of my coworkers were in different geographical locations. You had to do meetings in person.

Many people called meetings for easily solvable problems. Spending hours on meetings that could have been a phone call drained me a lot. For me, most of the meetings I had were a complete waste of time. Quite often, they were run by people who weren’t capable of good decision making skills. It was meetings for the sake of looking busy.

Perhaps if working from home were common practise prior to 2020, Covid put a lot of ‘what was necessary’ into perspective. I may have considered the office life, but that was a much different time.

2. Fake professionalism without any meaning to your work.

I’m going to get hit up for saying this: For a lot of office positions, there is no real ‘weight’ on the work that you do. (Of course not all office jobs are like this).

There’s no dire consequence if a report isn’t completed. You can restart a document if you realise that you’ve written it incorrectly. If you send the document incorrectly filled in, you get a second chance of amending it. Majority of your decisions have very little consequence. You may have to apologise to a client or spend a bit to redo a report, but things can generally be fixed. Nothing will burn down, it’s not life or death.

I realised that there was a great chance of never learning a valuable skill, if I stayed in this environment. You will always be dependent on being hired by someone, and you won’t get the option of working for yourself (if you wanted to).

I found that because of this, many people try hard to market themselves as someone important. I got tired of it quickly when I realised that many people’s selling point was their LinkedIn connection list, or them bragging about who they know in the industry.

This isn’t to say that office work is not important, but you’ll soon realise that many companies will still continue if certain roles were cut out. Additionally, your training will usually be specific to a company’s processes, so you’ll have to relearn a job when you move to another company.

3. Acting busy instead of being busy.

There’s this cultural belief that you’re not productive if you’re not busy all the time. So to keep up with the rest of their co-workers, many people will sell themselves as busy. Many people will over-exaggerate their tiredness, or the amount of unpaid overtime they do.

However, with a lot of things being automated these days, many people find themselves finishing their tasks before the 8 hour day is over.

I used to finish my work by 11:00 am. Yes, I sat bored in many of my jobs, and did a lot of coding classes online. At one point, even I started taking on freelance contracts for UX/UI design. I never told anyone.

There’s a special type of hell where you’re sitting all day in an office with nothing to do. People stress themselves out unnecessary if they feel guilty about not being perceived as working as hard, especially if their co-workers are.

4. Computer Screens all day in a chair.

I don’t believe in the existence of an ergonomic chair. Sitting at the desk for 8 hours a day really is terrible for your health, and counter productive to working. The sedentary life comes with all sorts of health issues, and you’ll soon develop a problem with your posture.

Fatigue from computer screens (or phone screens) only really became understood after the events of Covid in 2020. Lack of exercise and hight stress affects everyone’s mental health, again which is something that we only have begun to accept in recent years.

As someone with Astigmatism, looking at my computer and then away at the office lights really messed with me. I used to carry eyedrops with me and for many years I couldn’t wear contact lenses because it had f*k’ed up my eyes so much.

5. Stuck in four walls breathing only air-conditioned air.

It’s a special type of hell to be stuck in a room all day, breathing in recycled air that all of your co-workers have breathed in. Your skin is dry, eyes tired from the light panels above your desk.

The worst part of it is that you can’t just get up and move away from your desk. You’re supposed to be working. You don’t have freedom in where you go.

I felt like the company owned me. I couldn’t just get up and walk around on company time. I was paid to be stuck in that office.

Many tradespeople don’t believe me when I tell them that you can’t just leave an office. Your entire working life is confined to that floor. You can’t just get up and leave, only during lunch.