I'm a federal worker who returned to the office. The process felt rushed, and the people I work with aren't even there.
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- A formerly remote federal worker based in Illinois was called back into the office in March.
- They were asked to report to an office building they'd never heard of that has a trickier commute.
- They said other employees who RTO at the same facility don't work together but do commiserate.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with a federal worker based in Illinois. They've asked to be anonymous for fear of job repercussions. Business Insider has verified their identity and employment. It's been edited for length and clarity.
My agency announced the return to office.
I had been expecting it, so it wasn't that bad. But grieving the remote work took a couple of days — and grief is nonlinear, so it came and went and came and went. When I thought I was over being upset about it, it came back.
I was fully expecting to be assigned to downtown Chicago in the district office, but instead, I got an email at 10 o'clock on a Wednesday night with orders to show up on Monday at some place I'd never heard of.
I was like, "What the hell is this place?" I thought I had seen the full list of available places they could assign me to go. That one came out of left field, and it was a shock.
I was surprised at the office I was assigned to
I'd been looking in my agency's facilities resources, and they have these cool occupant guides that tell you everything you need to know about each one of their facilities. They didn't have one for this office. There was barely anything about it on my agency's internal website.
That area is home to a lot of industrial parks. There are some residents who live there, but it's largely office parks and factories. The only time I'd been here previously was to pick up something at a UPS center.
The nearest place to get lunch is the better part of a half-mile walk up the road to your choice of Mexican restaurants. No shade, I love Mexican — it's my favorite non-steak and potatoes cuisine.
At any rate, I showed up there on the Monday and I'm in a room with 10 other people who had their remote agreements terminated. There were people who used to work at the Chicago district office, there were people who have been remote for over 10 years, and there was me.
When we first got here, they hadn't cleared out offices for us, and they hadn't moved staff to other offices. They had to move people to accommodate us because this facility simply isn't built for this many employees, I guess.
The RTO process felt a bit rushed and mean
The speed of the return was, I want to say, intentional cruelty.
Still, the staff who manage the facilities have done their best to minimize the impact of that cruelty.
The people who made the decisions and the schedule on the return to office had almost no consideration for the space and administrative services people who actually handle the facilities. Those people have done heroic lifting in trying to make this all work. They shouldn't have had to move mountains on the schedule that they did.
Some of that was consistent with the Russell Vought quote about terrorizing us as federal employees. It's one thing for a private citizen to want to terrorize us. It's another for the director of the Office of Management and Budget to want to do it.
My commute is tricky — it's 42 stops if I take public transit
Getting here by public transit is very complicated. I haven't actually done it yet; I've been getting a ride from my wife.
I'm going to be busing when she goes back to work, but fortunately for me, she's not going to work right now.
It's six miles to my office, and then she has eight miles to her work — but this is all rush hour on city streets. It's about 25 minutes to get to my office if we leave early. It's going to take what was her 40-minute commute and make it over well over an hour.
To my office, it would be 42 stops on one bus and then a mile-and-a-quarter walk that involves going under a highway underpass. It's not the greatest walk.
In an ideal world, you can do it in an hour and five minutes. In the real world, I don't even know. If you miss one of the long buses, that's an extra 23 minutes while you're waiting for the next bus.
Going to the downtown office would have taken about 45 minutes — nine stops on the train. You miss a Chicago Transit Authority train, and it's only another five to seven minutes during rush hour. It's not a big deal.
It's $4 a day to take public transit, paid by the taxpayer due to the provisions of the Clean Air Incentives Act. While it's still intact, federal employees get subsidies if they take public transit.
If I drove, the car maintenance, gas, and total cost and depreciation would be all on me. Still, if I were here long-term and I knew I had certainty in my job, I would buy a second car.
I don't work with anyone else in the office
The people who RTO-ed were assigned to a conference room for a few days while we sorted things out.
We were all a little gobsmacked about being there. We're 10 randos thrown together from random divisions in a company.
None of us work together. None of us are from the same division. None of us have anything in common other than locality and having been remote.
There is almost no synergistic benefit to the American taxpayer or the government to have us stationed here in addition to the regular staff already stationed here.
We're a bunch of spreadsheet monkeys who could maybe show each other neat tricks in Excel. Otherwise, there's no knowledge transfer. There's no collaboration. We're not like a normal office as people would understand it.
Most of the people I work with are in Maryland.
When people return to the office, even at a large company that has maybe 10 sites or something, the people who are thrown back into the office generally work together. They generally sit together and maybe go to lunch together.
That's not what's happening here.
This is people from disparate parts of a big agency being thrown back together in whatever the nearest facility was regardless of what they do. There's no search for synergy in the return to office, at least from my experience.
We're commiserating. We're doing our best to support each other.
That was something that I thought would happen with return to work in general — that people would find other people, we would have some mutual solidarity and support, and we would be there for what I call a good water cooler session.
Even though we don't have a water cooler, we can still stand around and chat. That's something that just helps the morale and helps you get through the day.