The Office is increasingly looking like a pre-pandemic workplace time capsule

Slate

"Generation Z has already latched onto The Office as a generational touchstone, partly because its comforting mundanity is a constant in a sea of turbulence," says Michael Camp. "(Imagine a world where you were less worried about losing your job than getting stuck in it forever.) But there’s also something almost exotic about its clunkiness, in the way that vinyl LPs have become objects of fascination for generations raised on instantaneous digital access. As working from home becomes less of a temporary stopgap and moves closer to the new normal, the very idea of forcing people to gather in a room to spend most of their day emailing and messaging one another seems like an antiquity, one to be viewed with ample curiosity and just a little bit of envy. The Office increasingly seems useful in documenting a workplace culture that is, if not disappearing, at least receding. Since mid-March, many white-collar employees have been working remotely in order to stop the spread of the coronavirus. While retail employees, restaurant cooks, and medical personnel have continued to report to their usual workplaces, accountants, human resources professionals, and project managers have labored from their kitchens, bedrooms, and living rooms. Although the arrangement was originally intended to last perhaps a few weeks while the threat passed, the virus’s easy transmissibility has kept office parks across the country closed for over a half a year, with no end in sight. And some employers have begun to question whether it’s worth the trouble to open them back up again. Perhaps the phenomenon the show captured best was what it was like to spend most of one’s waking hours in a confined space with an arbitrarily assembled group of people who nonetheless became very close to one another."