I Don’t Miss the Office: I Haven’t Been There in Years

It didn’t take a pandemic to convince me to work from home

My entire life I’ve struggled with finding a job that didn’t require heavy customer contact. I am painfully shy and prone to crushing anxiety.

The two things I hate the most are dealing with customers and handling money. The two jobs for which I am most qualified are retail cashier and bank teller. My work life has been a nightmare.

My last full-time job skipped the face-to-face customer service and money handling and went directly into heavy customer contact, albeit on the phone.

Despite my constant anxiety and occasional panic attacks, I was promoted to a position where all angry callers were transferred to my line. After five years of being insulted, threatened, and otherwise abused because some dolt failed to balance their own checkbook and had overdrawn their account, I bailed.

Declaring myself a nervous wreck and collecting an official anxiety disorder diagnosis from my general practitioner, I sat home and expected the disability checks to roll in. Although it didn’t work that way, and I wound up cleaning hotel rooms part-time for a couple of years, I never went back to an office job.

My delicate constitution wouldn’t be able to bear it.

Even if I didn’t have to deal with customers, working at an office wouldn’t be for me. The only thing worse than the customers were my coworkers. Coworkers are a backstabbing gossiping bunch. The more there are, the worse it is.

I couldn’t handle it, the politics, backstabbing, and gossiping. No matter what you do for a living, there are back-biting people whether you’re dealing with customers or coworkers.

I have stories to tell of these backstabbing office coworkers. I had a coworker that drew outside the lines if you know what I mean, which I later found out wasn’t the first time he’d done it. He was also a big liar too and if you did something better than him, he would make up lies about how much better he did it.

People are cruel, gossipy, backstabbing, fake and they don’t even know that’s what they are. The workplace itself is toxic on a whole other level. If you start to do better than “them,” people will start to hate you for no reason other than fear of competition on an irrational level.

And it might not be fair to say that all offices were like this, but the one that I worked at was the worst place I have ever worked. I would rather have another job cleaning hotel toilets than work in an office again.

If I were to list the qualities I liked most about working from home, it would be this:

1. I don’t have to drive in rush hour traffic, which I hate.
2. My work dress-code is whatever makes me the most comfortable, which lately has been rather casual.
3. I work alone, no customers, no coworkers, no screaming, no backstabbing, no gossip.
4. I make my own hours, and I can nap or snack whenever I want.

I suspect that if you’re working in an office, you feel the same way. I’m guessing a lot of people hate the office but don’t have enough confidence to quit and go it alone. Is this you?

Maybe now is the time to make a change.