WORKING REMOTELY TRASHES SOCIETY

I used to work in a law office with about 70 people on the building’s seventh floor. Near the photocopier was a window-side table with a river view, on which the coffee maker rested. As a weight control strategy, people would bring unwanted junk food from home and leave it on the table.

One October, an attorney bought and placed a massive pumpkin there. The Pumpkin was over three feet in diameter; too broad to wrap one’s arms around. I hefted the orange sphere and estimated that it weighed at least 75 pounds.

The Pumpkin and some orange-frosted Dunkin Donuts enabled employees to celebrate Halloween in style. Predictably, in the days that followed October 31, people placed much undesired candy alongside The Pumpkin: Candy Corn, Raisinets and other assorted, third-rate forms of unlabeled, artificially colored, crystalline sugar.

The Pumpkin looked fine at Thanksgiving. And not yet out of place or date; still deeply orange, autumnal and solid.

As Christmas approached, someone brought in a Santa Claus hat and fluffy cotton beard to adapt the surprisingly durable Pumpkin to the season. People re-gifted pasty, bland, dry sugar cookies with green and red sprinkles, gingerbread men and fruitcakes by putting them next to The Santa Pumpkin. Remarkably, even the fruitcake was consumed. Throughout, The Pumpkin suffered no seasonal shrinkage.

I thought The Pumpkin would turn to mush early in the New Year. But January passed without any softening. The Pumpkin had some paper hearts taped to it around Valentine’s Day but revealed no loss of tone. Somehow, no one thought to decorate it with a black top hat and beard for Lincoln’s Birthday.

The Pumpkin was aging better than some of us were; perhaps not surprisingly, as it wasn’t eating daily bagels or coffee cakes, or handling contentious, circuitous litigation. I envisioned an infomercial in which a TV huckster would claim that some biochemical extracted—via some recently patented process—from some massive, ancient Incan strain of pumpkin would make your skin look ten years younger.

In March, people predictably brought in green, flab-building snacks as some weak tribute to the Irish. Someone put a leprechaun hat and a wispy beard on The Pumpkin, which remained round and firm.

Of course, in early April, someone fastened bunny ears to The Pumpkin. After Easter, stale Marshmallow Peeps were delivered to the table. One connoisseur maintained that the Peeps tasted better that way.

No matter. The important thing was that The Pumpkin still looked good. Though by now, its longevity was getting creepy. I wondered if there was some gimmickry going on, e.g., if some magic substance had been injected or topically applied. I started thinking about Botox. Taxidermy. Mummies. Lenin’s Mausoleum.

Even though the building is climate controlled, I thought the summer heat and sun coming through the long, large, west-facing window might break The Pumpkin’s will, especially on weekends, when the air conditioning was throttled back. But neither July nor August exacted any obvious toll.

The Pumpkin on the Table was becoming the Elephant in the Room. When I noted to a colleague, Greg Romano, how long The Pumpkin had lasted, he replied, “I know, it’s weird. It’s also weird that people dress it up. I’m worried that if it lasts much longer, people will start to worship it!”

Autumn came again. After a full year, The Pumpkin defiantly stood tall, or at least squatted broad. As Halloween approached, I thought, “Something needs to be done.”

I had an idea.

The night before Halloween, using canned pumpkin, I baked two pumpkin pies. While the pies were in the oven, I pulled a pair of old, expendable dress shoes and ill-fitting dress slacks from my closet.

On Halloween, I got up for work two hours early, dressed casually and arrived in the office at 7 AM. The coast was clear.

First, I took my expendable shoes and slacks to the men’s room. Then I went to the table and, lifting with my legs and not my back, hoisted The Pumpkin and quickly waddled down the hallway. Twice setting it down so I could rest—def did not want to drop and smash that monstrous vegetable—I toted it to the men’s room about 75 yards away. I neither saw nor heard another person.

And no one saw me as I nudged open the men’s room door. Once inside, I opened one of the steel stall doors. The stall enclosure started about 18 inches off the floor and reached nearly six feet high. I balanced The Pumpkin on the toilet seat. I then placed the shoes on the floor and set the crinkled pants legs atop the shoes, to make it appear that someone was excreting last night’s dinner. Thereafter, I latched the enclosure from the inside of the stall and slid, belly on the tile floor, under the enclosure’s locked door, washed my hands and exited the lavatory.

I returned to my office and fetched the two pumpkin pies. I brought them to The Pumpkin’s prior location. Next to the pies, I left a handwritten note, saying only “I’m History!” I had drawn a frowny face below the message.

I came back to my office, changed into my business clothes and began to work. It was about 7:05.

People started to trickle in around 8 AM. When a quorum of employees had arrived, a perceptible buzz grew in the hallways.

“The Pumpkin’s gone!”

“It was there last night when I left at 6:30.”

“I was here until 7.”

“Is it behind some file cabinet?!”

Etc.

People were excited. Americans love those TV crime mysteries. The search was on. But as I worked on a brief, no one could find The Pumpkin.

Around 9:30, I was in a colleague’s, John Stanton’s, office discussing a case. I mean a real case, not the Case of the Missing Pumpkin. John had a reputation as a wiseass. Two of our colleagues came to his open doorway and blurted out to John, “You took The Pumpkin! I know it was you!”

John smiled like the cat that ate the canary. He said, “Maybe I did. And maybe I didn’t.”

John was playing it to the hilt. It was very funny to watch, especially because he didn’t know that I had made The Pumpkin disappear. John only knew that he hadn’t done so and was clearly pleased that people would think to blame him. He did little to discourage that suspicion.

“What did you do with it?” they demanded to know. The Pumpkin was sufficiently large that every one of few plausible hiding places had already been plumbed.

John smiled again and said, “Who was that guy that cut up all those people in Wisconsin? Jeffrey Dahmer? I Dahmer-ized it!”

We both laughed out loud. I had to give John credit. He was spontaneously, adeptly going to Level 2. The exasperated ersatz detectives departed to pursue other leads. John and I finished our business.

On the way back to my office, I could hear the secretaries still talking animatedly about The Pumpkin. As I passed Sherita, a young, new paralegal, she exclaimed, with a big smile, and to no one in particular, “This is a FUN place to work!”

I felt good about helping Sherita to like her new job.

The Pumpkin remained hidden, almost in plain sight. I went to the bathroom several times that day and saw the shoes and pants still on the floor, as if someone was taking a very long time in there; like maybe he had eaten too many orange-frosted doughnuts. Dude needed some roughage.

The Pumpkin remained sequestered and the pants and shoes remained on the floor the following day.

On the third day, The Pumpkin was found. I guess the janitor figured out that something wasn’t right: good, old-fashioned police work. I felt a little bad that he had to crawl in there to solve the crime.

The Pumpkin was returned to the coffee table, with a paper tablecloth beneath it. I hope it was cleaned beforehand; after all, there were viruses even before March, 2020.

Shortly after its second Christmas, The Pumpkin began to buckle. A dreary New Jersey January can have that effect. The end was stunningly swift, but peaceful. Scores of admirers filed by to pay their respects. I didn’t see anyone kiss The Pumpkin, though arrangements were made to respectfully compost it.

In the decade-plus that followed, I never told anyone in the office that I was responsible for PumpkinGate. I knew that, like Banksy, I might want to pull other pranks, and wished not to be suspected based on The Pumpkin’s disappearance. I also didn’t want someone else to pull a future prank that someone would find offensive and for me to be unjustly accused because of my prank history.

Did I dynamite the Georgia Guidestones this week? Maybe I did. And maybe I didn’t.

But I won’t deny doing other office mischief. I posted whimsical fliers advertising going away parties for people, including one who wasn’t leaving. As a Friday departure ritual, I used to throw a football from the sixth-floor landing into the spacious atrium below, where a colleague would run under it and catch it. The security guards yelled at us; they had no sense of fun. But we did it again, anyway. Repeatedly.

Most enduringly, I Velcro-ed a 24 x 36 inch whiteboard to my door. On it, I wrote hundreds of Dry-Erase multi-colored, spoof news headlines—like The Onion or Babylon Bee—substituting some office mate for some politician or celebrity, often with some allusion to an obliquely-related office event or case. Beneath each headline, I sketched a crude depiction. I concocted these ideas as I walked from the train station to the office after having read the morning newspaper.

Dozens of people walked by each day and chuckled at my fake news. Every office mate—no matter how jaded or staid—whose name was featured on the whiteboard would smile from ear-to-ear at being the celebrity du jour. It was amusing to watch. Win-win.

Amazingly—to those who know me—I never crossed any PC line that might have subjected me to an HR intervention. I did write some transgressive stuff. But I had just enough discernment to laugh at these while behind my closed door or to show only one or two people before erasing them and drafting something less edgy.

Work brings human beings into contact; or at least, pre-Scamdemic, it used to. During my in-person work life—in office and non-office settings—I’ve met many hundreds of people, face-to-face. Inevitably, you don’t like all of your co-workers and the feeling is mutual; there’s a reason The Office enjoyed a long TV run.

But most co-workers were decent and pleasant and some were (intentionally) funny. We knew each others’ names and something about each others’ non-work lives. Exchanging greetings and smiles in the hall had great, albeit understated, psychological worth.

Some of these people became close friends. We did fun and/or interesting stuff together outside of work. When you’re with people so often, it’s inevitable that you become big parts of each others’ worlds. I went to co-workers’ weddings, birthday parties and spouses’ and parents’ funerals, and visited them in hospitals. I wrote and sang tribute songs for some of them at their farewell parties. Every joke is twice as funny when accompanied by guitar. Maybe three times.

Further, the office was a place where people from different backgrounds were forced to interact and (usually) decide to like each other. Additionally, having offices in urban areas, as mine was, brings at least some economic activity and foot traffic to areas that will otherwise become ghost towns, or worse.

And when you work near people, you organically discuss work experiences and ideas. This enables you to do your job better, or more efficiently. So there’s that.

My son earned a graduate degree from a big-name university in May, 2020. From then until January, 2021—eight months—when he found a job, he spent 10 hours/day, seven days/week looking for work. His younger sister had a job upon graduating in May, 2020. She worked remotely for over a year. During much of that time, both of them lived in front of computer screens, in their childhood bedrooms, with almost no social life. It was painful to watch two people in the primes of their lives live like this. It hurt more to know that tens of millions of young people were living the same way. The lockdowns, fearmongering and the “vaxx” mandates were deeply evil political opportunism by the “Party of the People.” I’ll never forgive those who effected or supported this life-wrecking theater.

My son never met his bosses before he was hired. Instead, the company conducted a series of Zoom interviews. A few months after working on-line, he moved out-of-state to work at his new office. When my wife and I visited him there one weekend, he showed us his workplace. It’s nice. It’s in a small office park surrounded by thick trees and a koi pond. Most of the 40 employees have window-ed offices. It even has a spacious common room with exercise equipment, yoga mats and a ping pong table.

But on the average day, only five employees show up. Everyone else works remotely. Some of that sweatpants cohort lives in other states. They have no plans to ever work in the office. My son has never met some—and seldom sees most—of the people with whom he ostensibly works. When he goes to the office, there’s no one with whom to hit ping pongs balls at lunchtime or at 7 PM. Though I guess the table can be bent into a right angle so you can hit balls to yourself.

No pranks, smiles, jokes or friendships will happen during such Scamdemic-driven work arrangements. You’ll save commuting time but you’ll have fewer friends. You’ll also lose a life-compartmentalizing place to which you can go, and then detach from at the end of the workday. As with all other Scamdemic measures, the gullible failed to consider the downstream, delayed harm caused by remote work. They fretted, waved their arms, caved in, locked down and masked up.

Closing workplaces has been/is a devastating, society-wide blow to social cohesion and human happiness. Devious social engineers could not have devised a more destructive path to social division and human alienation than isolating as many workers as possible in front of computer screens in their homes.

Social destruction was a central Scamdemic objective. This surely has not been about public health.