I missed working with other humans.

Admittedly, I’ve been working as a “remote” resource pretty consistently since 2014. And I realize that there were historically two different types of remote workers: the hermits with the insane home workstation, and the folks who left the house every morning to just set up shop at Starbucks. I was a mix of both, but would lean more towards the prior.

That said, many of the folks that I work with are no stranger to seeing me post a quick brb starbucks or brb caffeine in the team chat, and probably sign on from Starbucks, or the deli, or wherever I ended up. Decidedly, this was part of my weight gain over the years, but that’ll probably be the topic of a blog post for another day.

This was a good workflow for me, and it gave me enough of a balance between feeling like a shut-in and spending the day galavanting all around the greater bi-county area. I would work long hours from home, and I would often have lunch dates set up with friends. It was great.

And then COVID-19 struck. Everyone became a shut-in. Even though I’d visit the offices of my day jobs once every couple weeks or months, I lost my place to collaborate with people. I lost the ability to have the blunt conversations over a beverage during a happy hour. I lost one of my best methods to build and maintain bridges: human contact¹.

Over the course of the next couple months, lots of interesting things happened.

• We all became shut-ins, because we all had to.
• We all became used to the sounds of barking dogs and bored children in the background of every call, and the stigma surrounding that has largely disappeared.
• We’ve replaced the happy hour with the virtual happy hour on WebEx, Zoom, and Teams.
• We’ve all lost our outer circle of acquaintances.

I’ve worked with a handful of friends on side projects over the years. I briefly mentioned an available real estate posting on Craigslist in passing, thinking that it’d be a fun idea to set up an office so we can co-work and chat throughout the day, essentially gaining back what we lost through the pandemic. But even better, being able to set up an office space that’s separate from our homes. A place that we can go to, that’s set up for us, by us, the way we want it.

It was a fun idea, and I just let it go as just a fleeting idea until I got a random text message a few days later.

hey i’m checking out that office in 10 min want to see it?

Well, I’m not going to not check it out.² It is amazing how quickly I can rearrange my calendar based on a completely unnecessary distraction.

We walked in there, and saw a simple room. Probably 12’ x 15’ in dimension. Not huge, but definitely room enough for two people to work without feeling like they are invading each other’s personal space. It was a showing. The landlady was very nice and cordial. But it was just a showing. I thought to myself that this friend was going to look at it and find something about it that he hated, and drop the idea.

I’m sure you already know how this is going.

So, we got the keys about a week ago. I started bringing used office furniture from my basement lower level over to the new office, and started laying it out. He dropped off a bunch of stuff for his work space, and some of the common stuff that we’ll use in the office. Then he went across the state for a bunch of days to work on a project.

Today was our first day working together at the new Nerd Shack. We’re working on completely different things, for completely different companies and industries throughout the day. We’re paying less for a full space that is truly ours than we would be paying for a membership to a co-working space. Sure, we have to bring our own caffeine, but it’s worth the savings.

He vented to me about some issues he’s having with one of his clients today. I was able to listen to him, and commiserate based on some of my prior experiences with that client, albeit from another perspective entirely.

I shared my tears of laughter with him when sharing one of the silliest things that my team collectively did today.

It was awesome to co-work with someone today. I missed it.

I think I’m going to enjoy this.

But he left his desk untidy. That’s going to irritate me. Let’s see how this goes.