I can’t go back to the commute again. I just can’t

Since returning from her soggy holiday in Cornwall, my boss Bella has been like a woman possessed. Those members of the Bella Vista PR staff who aren’t lucky enough to be on annual leave have been summoned to thrice-daily Zoom sessions. It turns out that when Bella wasn’t trying to hack the thermostat for her holiday rental’s central heating (the fight to get her deposit back having put two deckchairs on the wood burner continues) she was speed-reading business books. She has fallen in love with Thought Showers and Thunder Claps by an American entrepreneur/professional paddle-boarder/philanthropist called Dwayne Bailey the Third.

I looked up Dwayne the Third’s book online. In his bio he claims to have started 20 successful companies and been able to retire at the age of 35 due to his amazing creative business methods. Downloading a sample, I got the gist of those methods. “Thought showering,” looks a lot like what we call “having a team meeting” and “thunder claps” are the things formerly known as “ideas”. You don’t need to buy the book, unless you’re also interested in how Dwayne spends his days now he’s retired. He starts with a run, a cold shower and a kale smoothie. That sets the tone for a day of bio-hacking and meditating on his own greatness. Dwayne’s days seem much harder work than going into an office.

Talking of going into an office…

On Monday, Bella decreed that our thrice-daily Zoom sessions would all begin with a “thought shower”: three minutes when we would each say whatever came into our heads in the hope that one of us would deliver a decent “thunder clap”. There were no words to describe the team’s reaction to this edict. My colleague George sent me a message that contained nothing but the scream emoji over and over and over. And over.

“OK gang, start speaking your thoughts,” Bella exhorted us as she waved a three-minute egg-timer at her camera.

George messaged me, “I can’t. She’ll sack me.”

By Wednesday, we were all drenched through from thinking and Bella was getting frustrated.

“I can’t help thinking that this would all be so much easier if we were together in one room,” she said as we ended another painful three minutes without a thunderclap.

The rest of us stayed silent, hoping that if we didn’t respond, she might not say what we thought she was about to say. She said it anyway, “Perhaps it’s time we were back in the office.”

Every one of my colleagues but Bella was suddenly looking downwards, trying not to be seen to be texting. Our secret Bella Vista WhatsApp group (everybody but the boss) was abuzz.

“Well?” Bella persisted. “What do you lot think? Do you agree?”

I saw her eyes roving her screen. Who was she looking at? Was she going to pick on me? She was going to pick on me.

“Trudy?”

I mouthed the words.

“Trudy,” Bella sighed. “You’re on mute.”

I wasn’t on mute. I was simply speechless. I cleared my throat and started again. “Social distancing,” I said.

“What about it?”

“It’s impossible. The office is much too small for all of us to be in it safely at any one time.”

That was true. My desk was so close to George’s that when Bella stood between our desks to chat to either one of us, she would inevitably brush something off the other’s desk with her buttocks.

“I’ve already thought about distancing and have drawn up a new floor plan to ensure each member of staff has the maximum amount of space possible,” Bella assured us.

“But what about ventilation,” George piped up. “Have you thought about ventilation?”

“We can open the windows.”

The reason we never opened the windows was that our office was on the lower ground floor and if the wind was in the wrong direction, the whiff from the bins was enough to make you faint.

“And I’ve bought a fan.”

“Great,” George messaged me. “That’ll circulate the miasma nicely.”

I tried one last tack. “Isn’t the advice that if we can still work from home we should?”

“But we can’t work from home,” said Bella. “Take this Zoom call. It’s been utterly unproductive. If we were all sitting around the big table in the meeting room, drinking coffee, staring each other in the eye…”

“Still, the only thunderclap we’d hear would be Bella farting…” wrote George.

“I’d like you all to start coming back in on a regular basis,” Bella said firmly. “I think we should put Wednesday 8th in the diary for our first official face-to-face meeting since March 2020… 10am kick-off… I’ll buy the coffees.”

As soon as the call ended, the messages went into overdrive.

“Can she force us?”

“What’s the law on this?”

“I can’t go back to the commute again. I can’t. I haven’t worn shoes for nearly two years.”

We all had our reasons for wanting to continue to work from home but Bella was determined. Mid-afternoon, we all received an email outlining her plans for “La rentrée”, as if calling it by a French name would make it sound exciting rather than something to be dreaded. None of us was taken in by her enthusiasm. She often seems to forget that we’re all PR professionals. We know all the tricks.

My colleague Sarah and I swapped messages until late in the evening. Though Sarah and I had worked side by side for five years, we had not spent much time together outside the office. Whenever the rest of us went out for drinks, she always went straight home to relieve the childminder. She had two gorgeous children, who looked Boden-catalogue perfect in the photograph that had pride of place on her desk. I could understand why she was not in the least bit happy at the prospect of returning to the commute and seeing her children for just an hour at the beginning and end of each day again. But it was more complicated than that. After many messages, Sarah finally asked if she could call for an actual chat. I could hear the stress in her voice.

“Trudy,” she began. “How on earth am I going to tell Bella I moved to Edinburgh in July?”