Finding on First Office Lunch
The office has reopened. Lunch now requires physical presence, a decision about where to sit, and awareness of who is watching.
A Field Guide to the First Office Lunch Observations Compiled from the Return Period, August 2022
Preliminary Note
This guide documents the conditions encountered during first-week office lunches following the resumption of in-person work. The field conditions described here are specific to organizations that have retained a hybrid or flexible policy, meaning the population of people present on any given day is variable and cannot be predicted from the previous day's population. This variability is the primary driver of the phenomena described below.
Phase 1: The Midday Arrival at the Kitchen
At approximately 12:15 PM, the subject leaves their desk carrying food brought from home or intent to purchase food from a nearby establishment. The kitchen contains between two and six colleagues. The subject has worked with some of these colleagues for multiple years. The subject has not been in a room with most of them since late 2021.
Remote lunch required no observable decisions. Office lunch is a performance with an audience of colleagues who are also performing.
Phase 2: The Seating Decision
The choice of where to sit is the most consequential unscheduled decision the person will make before 2 PM.
Sitting alone reads as antisocial. Sitting near someone reads as a request for conversation. Sitting near someone who is on a call is a tactical error. Sitting at the large communal table requires accepting that the table may fill with people the subject has not yet calibrated to.
The subject pauses near the microwave. The pause lasts four seconds. This pause reads, to observers, as consideration of the microwave. It is, in fact, a full social assessment of the room.
Phase 3: The Conversation
A colleague has said hello. The subject has said hello. A follow-up observation about the day is required. "Back in the office" is a viable observation but has a two-week shelf life before it becomes a comment on a situation that has passed.
The subject asks the colleague how they have been. The colleague says they have been well. The colleague asks how the subject has been. The subject says they have also been well. Both parties have said the word "well." Neither party has communicated information.
Phase 4: The Unexpected Duration
The subject intended to eat lunch in eighteen minutes. The lunch has taken thirty-four minutes because a second colleague arrived and a conversation began that the subject could not exit without a visible reason to exit.
The subject does not have a visible reason. The subject has a meeting at 1 PM. The subject mentions the meeting. The meeting is eleven minutes away. This is technically true and is being used as a departure mechanism.
The Absurd Rule
There is no rule governing office lunch. This is the entire problem. Remote lunch had no social infrastructure and required none. Office lunch has social infrastructure and requires constant real-time navigation of that infrastructure with no documentation and no training.
The subject ate lunch. The lunch was fine. The subject is more tired than they expected to be.