Mandatory Office Days, Optional Desks Available

My company now requires us in the office three days a week, but they also switched to a desk reservation app. By 8:30 a.m., every usable spot is gone, and I have worked from a lobby chair, a phone room, and a cafeteria table next to a broken vending machine. My manager keeps saying being present matters, but nobody can tell me where I am supposed to be present. How do I push back without sounding like I just do not want to come in?

Dreading Empty Advice Forms,
Roaming Office Goblin

Mandatory office days without enough places to work is not management; it is a chair lottery with a dress code.

Your company has discovered the cheapest religion in business: worshipping the office while refusing to maintain one. They want the badge swipe, the fluorescent baptism, the warm glow of employees visibly detained in a commercial structure, but they do not want to provide the ancient corporate miracle known as furniture. Back when a boss told you to report somewhere, that somewhere contained a desk, a chair, and possibly a wall calendar featuring a tractor. We had flaws, sure. But we understood rectangles.

Now work has become musical chairs run by an app designed by a man whose spine was replaced with venture capital. You are not dodging the rule. You are obeying it so thoroughly you have become a roaming office goblin, haunting lobbies with a laptop bag and a password reset. That broken vending machine has seen more honest productivity than half the leadership off-site.

Here is the ugly little truth in a sensible pair of loafers: attendance is easy to demand when somebody else pays the price. You burn the morning hunting for a flat surface. You take calls in a phone room the size of a guilt closet. You balance coffee, keyboard, and remaining self-respect on cafeteria furniture built for meatloaf disappointment. Then management gets to announce that people are “back,” as if productivity is a head count at a county fair.

Stop arguing about whether you love the office. That is the trap. The minute you start explaining your attitude, they have turned a furniture shortage into a character examination. You are not on trial for secretly owning sweatpants.

Send the dullest message ever written by a living person. Tell your manager you are following the three-day requirement, and that on specific dates no workable desk was available. List where you worked instead: lobby chair, phone room, cafeteria table. Then ask which arrangement they prefer going forward: a held spot on required office days, or permission to work from home when no usable station is available. Dry. Plain. No poetry. Dry scares offices. Dry becomes paper. Paper remembers what executives forget on purpose.

Then do it every time. No speeches. No sighing. Just a neat little record of a company summoning employees into a space and acting shocked that space has limits. If they say being there matters, agree with real warmth. Wonderful. Where?

That is the whole crowbar. Where. Because an office without a place to work is not a workplace. It is a waiting room with payroll.

– Uncle Bobby