ghostwriter series: full-time in office

I remember being asked to go from 2 days in the office to 3 days, and you would have thought people were being asked to permanently strap themselves to their desks and never see their families again. There was outrage. One person even outwardly shamed the C-Suite, and was promptly fired. 

Anyway, many people are going through this right now - most of them from 3 days to 5 days, and I thought it would make an interesting entry for my Ghostwriter’s series. Now, I am a fan of hybrid work, but I will not risk my job for it - as long as I can occasionally watch my daughter’s netball matches.

Here’s the prompt: 

“A lot of companies are going from three days in the office to five days. A lot of people are disgruntled. I would like two relevant dead people to debate this. Let's go with Bertrand Russell against Benjamin Franklin. Russell is against, Franklin is for. Bring some humour into it, and let it reach a conclusion.”

Here's what it wrote back:

The motion before the house: that the working week should return, in full, to five days in the office. Benjamin Franklin speaks for it. Bertrand Russell speaks against. Both have been dead for some time, which has improved their arguments and ruined their timekeeping.

FRANKLIN: I'll keep it short, for brevity is a kind of thrift. The case is simple. A man who is seen to work is trusted to work. Show me an empty desk, sir, and I'll show you an idle hand.

RUSSELL: Benjamin, they no longer have desks. They have a "hot-desk," which is a desk belonging to no one and resented by all. You are defending a chair a stranger sat in this morning.

FRANKLIN: A shared chair is a thrifty chair.

RUSSELL: It is a chair with somebody else's yoghurt beneath it. And to reach it, your trusted man must first spend two hours of his one life in a steel carriage that smells of other people's coffee — in order to sit in a building and answer emails he could have answered from his bed. We have not made him industrious. We have made him commute.

FRANKLIN: There is virtue in early rising.

RUSSELL: Not in rising early to go somewhere pointless. That is merely being punctual about waste.

FRANKLIN: You always did prefer the hammock to the workshop.

RUSSELL: I wrote a book in praise of idleness and I stand by every word I didn't have to get up for. But you mistake me. I am not against work. I am against theatre. The five-day office isn't a workshop, Benjamin. It's a stage, on which busy people perform busyness for managers who have confused being watched with being useful.

FRANKLIN: And yet a young apprentice learns his trade beside a master. You cannot catch wisdom down a wire. Some things pass only between people in a room — the half-heard remark, the corrected mistake, the company of one's fellows. A man alone at home is a man slowly forgetting how to be among men.

RUSSELL: That, I'll grant you. There is something in the room the wire can't carry. I have attended a meeting "on Zoom," and I assure you the dead feel more present.

FRANKLIN: So we agree! Five days, then —

RUSSELL: We agree on the room. We do not agree on four hours in a carriage to reach a meeting that is itself held on the wire — between people sitting six feet apart, in headphones, so as not to overhear one another.

FRANKLIN: …They do that?

RUSSELL: They call it collaboration.

FRANKLIN: (a silence) I founded a club that met one evening a week, over wine, to improve one another's minds. Once a week. I never proposed we live in the room.

RUSSELL: Then there's the crack in your case, Benjamin. You came to defend industry and you've been handed a mandate that defends attendance. They are not the same god. The first asks what a man makes. The second only asks where he's sitting while he fails to make it.

FRANKLIN: (slowly) I'll confess it. I valued the work, never the watching. To haul a man across a city five days a week so a manager might see the back of his head — that is not thrift. That is fear, wearing a lanyard.

RUSSELL: Carried.

FRANKLIN: Carried. Though I maintain the young should come in more than the old. And that no one should answer email in bed.

RUSSELL: On the second point you'll lose. But quietly, and from a great distance, I find I rather like you.

The conclusion: The motion falls — not because the office is worthless, but because five days defends the wrong thing. Come in for the room, the apprentice, the half-heard remark. Stay home for the work that needs only you, a desk and no audience. And never, the house agrees, hold a meeting on the wire between people in the same building. Even the dead have standards.

Marking its homework:

This one's funnier than the usual run, and I should say so before I start picking. "Punctual about waste" made me laugh. So did the yoghurt under the hot-desk, and "fear, wearing a lanyard" is a good line to end on. 

Give it two people and let them spark off each other and the AI can clearly do jokes. But here's what I kept snagging on: it isn't a debate. It's a conversion. Franklin turns up to defend the office and then gets walked backwards until he agrees, point by point. Russell never actually has to win anything. He was always going to.

And that's the tell. Watch how well-behaved everyone is. Franklin's best card – the apprentice, the half-heard remark, the things that only pass between people in a room – is the one real argument for going in. The moment he plays it, Russell concedes it and folds it neatly into his own conclusion. So even Franklin's strongest moment ends up serving the side that was always going to carry the motion. Nobody's allowed to land a blow that might change the result. It's evenly witty, reasonable, and charming, and that evenness is the giveaway. Not one line costs the writer anything. There's no risk in the room, because the verdict was decided before the doors opened.

Which is why the conclusion, for all its polish, hands you the answer nobody was ever going to argue with. Come in for the good bits, stay home for the rest, don't hold idiotic meetings. Quite. The trouble is the topic isn't reasonable – people are properly angry about this, the three-to-five lot especially – and the debate is charming about that anger rather than feeling any of it.