We’re currently in the break between Fall and Winter trimesters, which means that classes are not in session, and the vast majority of students have left campus to go… wherever it is that they go. Faculty are free to do whatever, which basically means some combination of research, prep for next term, and administrative stuff that was pushed off during the term. Facilities staff are frantically trying to repair stuff that would be too disruptive to fix while students are around, and student life staff are trying to recover and recharge before January.
The break hasn’t led to a big change in my schedule: I still come into the office around 7am, so that I can knock off around 3 when the kids get out of school. (They don’t really need me to watch them any more, but depending on the weather, they may or may not need rides somewhere.) In the break, I’m a bit more likely to go home at lunchtime and just stay there, doing whatever other work I need to do from home.
What does change is the experience of being in the office. Our admin assistant drops down to half time during breaks, so there are a bunch of days when she doesn’t come in at all. When she’s not in the office, I can easily go the entire day without speaking to another person. My office is inside the department office, so it’s very unlikely that any of the small number of people working on campus will happen to pass by. It’s essentially indistinguishable from work-from-home, just with a bigger desk and a second monitor.
My initial reaction to this set-up was to think “Oh, this will be great— no distractions!” Given my distaste for formal structure, it seemed like a great opportunity for undisturbed working alone. It took a week or two for me to realize that I kind of hate it. The lack of people is really intensely corrosive for my general mood. By the time I get home I’m absolutely desperate for human interaction, but given that the kids are 12 and 15, they’re not super communicative, and Kate’s working until 5-6 most days (sometimes at home, but there’s a limit on how much I can pester her). I find myself making silly trips to the store just so I can chat with the cashiers in a supermarket.
This has been on my mind a bunch, but I’ve ended up typing about it for two reasons. One is a small spate of work-from-home discussion on Twitter, including this tweet and a couple nested within it:
The “difficult to admit to yourself that going into the office maybe did something for your mental health” part really resonated for me, as described above. Of course, the replies to it fall in the usual pattern, with a very vocal group of people outraged at the suggestion that there might be anything positive about in-person work. (At least it was relatively free of accusations of wanting people to die from Covid— nature really is healing!)
The other item was this graph about the rise of online dating, which was dubbed “catastrophic”:
I’m a bit more conflicted about this, as one of the single-digit percentage of people who met their partners online in the final decade of the 20th century. There’s certainly something to be said for expanding the pool of potential partners— see this from Michael Nielsen and many of the responses— but at the same time, I’m also sympathetic to the idea that there are benefits to knowing someone before you date them, as expressed here. (My own online experience was kind of a hybrid— Kate and I didn’t meet via a dating service, but a Usenet newsgroup, where we had a bunch of virtual conversations before ever meeting in person, since she was in Boston and I was in DC.)
I swear I saw, but now can’t find, somebody responding to Nielsen’s question about what’s catastrophic here saying basically that to the extent that this reflects more-compatible people finding each other through algorithms, it’s fine, but to the extent that it comes from people not having friends, it’s an absolute disaster. And that’s pretty much where I end up on this: while I was never a fan of trying to meet people in bars, I feel like there’s a lot to be said for being out and about, interacting with others in person in real time.
This is, of course, not true for everyone; Lord knows, there’s no shortage of people responding to both the work-from-home and online-dating tweets who disparage the whole idea of in-person interaction. It is absolutely and unquestionably true for some of us, though— this whole work-alone thing has been driving me nuts, and one of my lifelines has been the regular Friday happy hour (though, to be clear, I have not the slightest interest in dating any of the regulars there). Just getting to spend a while hanging out with friends, talking about nothing in particular, does a world of good for my mental state. Another is playing pick-up hoops a couple of days a week (which I wasn’t able to do for a while because I busted up the thumb on my shooting hand)— again, there’s something really restorative about being in the same place as other people.
But, really, as much as I’m not looking forward to having to do grading again, the students just can’t come back to campus soon enough. It’s creepy when they’re not here…
So, yeah, that’s a thing. And now, I’m going to knock off to go to the gym, then get some beers and wings this afternoon. If you’re in favor of those things, here’s a button:
And if you want to tell me I’m a weirdo, the comments will be open:
I very much agree with you in finding this to be challenging. And here it’s not just between terms, but also (in a lot of departments) when classes are in session, too. If you’re in a hallway of an academic building where there are faculty offices but no classrooms, it’s kind of a ghost town.
I agree university buildings can be a bit creepy without students. The loss of purpose is too dramatic…
For the rest, IDK. Without talking about productivity, there are people who find broad pointless interactions with acquaintances and strangers to be, well, pointless and even tiresome.
I’m given to understand that introvert/extrovert is no longer seen as a valid lens for analysis but err… was there not something to it?