Man finds March 2020 calendar and photos of his ex-wife after returning to office: ‘Pre-Covid time capsule’

A man has documented his experience returning to his office after two years of working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Jason Dempsey, who goes by the username @thejasondempsey on TikTok, revealed this week that his company requested he return to working from his office, which he last worked in in March 2020.

The return meant that Dempsey discovered what he described as a “pre-Covid time capsule,” with the video showing some of the things he left on his desk two years ago, including photos of his now-ex-wife.

“They brought me back to the office, aka pre-Covid time capsule,” Dempsey wrote in a text caption on the video, which showed him sitting in an office cubicle.

The TikToker then proceeded to show the “old desk calendar” in his cubicle, which still displayed the date March 2020, and a coffee cup that still had remnants of coffee in it, which he noted he should “probably clean”.

In the video, Dempsey also revealed that in the two-year period, he had forgotten the password to his desk phone, as he showed himself entering digits into the phone only to be told that his voicemail password was “incorrect”.

Dempsey concluded the video with his final discovery, photos of his ex-wife, which he filmed himself “stowing” in a drawer of his filing cabinet.

“Flashback to a simpler time… March 2020,” Dempsey captioned the video.

The TikTok of Dempsey’s pre-pandemic office has since been viewed more than 3.1m times, with viewers in the comments both entertained and fascinated by the video.

“The calendar is like from a movie. When time just like stopped,” one person wrote.

Another person said that “something about the calendar hit [them],” to which Dempsey agreed that it was “so surreal”.

Others shared their own experiences returning to their office after an extended period of working from home, with one person commenting: “Like walking into a museum seriously. I can’t even explain the vibe, just dusty objects in the dark and dead quiet.”

“Man, I feel you. We just recently went back to our office too and it just felt surreal. Everything was untouched,” someone else wrote.

The video also prompted many comments about Demsey’s divorce, with a number of viewers revealing that they too got divorced during the pandemic.

“Did everyone get divorced during the pandemic? I sure did,” one viewer said, while another wrote: “We all went through a lifetime of events in a two-year span huh?”

In response to another viewer who wondered how many divorces happened because of the pandemic, Dempsey said: “[The] pandemic escalated things for many.”

“LOL! I also got a pandemic divorce and now I’m engaged to a whole new person. I feel this so much,” someone else commented.

This is not the first time that Dempsey has shared a candid look into his return to an office environment, as he has been documenting his realisations in a TikTok series titled: “Return to office struggles”.

In his most recent video, Dempsey questioned why “humans are so loud,” as he noted that “there were seven different conversations happening within a 15-foot radius” of his cubicle that day, and it was “so loud and disruptive” that he’d had to put his noise-cancelling headphones on just so he could “concentrate and get [his] job done”.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love my coworkers and they do excellent work, I depend on them to do excellent work so that I can do excellent work,” the TikToker continued. “I just don’t want to listen to them doing that excellent work, like I just want to stay in my home office, in the silence, with my dogs, where I can do excellent work unbothered.”