Re-entry — The Unexpected Table
--
My first time back in the office for 17 months — from workplace to alien environment, being stalked by an unseen predator…
I looked down at the table that shouldn’t have beeen there. Just inside the revolving doors, a cheap, circular table, the wood-grain formica jarring with the carefully-styled furniture of the rest of the lobby. At just below waist-height, the primary function of this intruder was also uncomfortable. Under a cardboard sign there was a ring-binder, in landscape orientation, containing paper ‘sign-in’ sheets, and beside it, two plastic plant pots, both filled with lidless Bic pens, leaning against the sides like battle-weary soldiers waiting to go over the top. One pot was green, the other red. The instructions told me to choose a pen from the green pot, and after use, deposit it in the red pot. Was this what some people call hygiene theatre?
I picked a pen from the green pot. It had that sticky yet slimy feel that instantly repels that we have all got used to over the past year 18 months — hand cleanser gel. My mask fogged my glasses as I bent over to fill in the required details. The form asked for my name, department, line manager and entry time. This last one posed an unexpected problem. I hadn’t worn a watch in over a year, and the thought of putting one on had never entered my mind. It took me a little while to realise I’d have to consult the screen on my phone.
This was my first time in the office for 17 months, obliged to come in to receive a hard-copy document that for reasons of security could only be delivered here. This was no particular hardship for me, my home being just half-an-hour’s stroll from the office building. Walking the familiar route again I’d gone back onto autopilot as if no time had passed, though it had been with a new underlying sense of trepidation — a queasy chill in my stomach, like someone or something was there at the office, waiting.
I walked across the huge, airport-like lobby. The new headquarters had only been occupied a couple of years before the pandemic banished us all on a random Thursday in March 2020. It still had that new car smell. My trainers squeaked across the marble floor as I passed the square-edged couches, now even more forbidding than their geometry made them, all roped off with yellow warning signs. More signs exhorting…
