55 Return-to-Office Jokes
The CEO sent a 2,000-word memo about the magic of in-person collaboration. From his house.
"Three days a week, anchor days are Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday." So the two days you can pick are Monday and Friday. Which is to say, no days.
I tapped my badge expecting nothing. It beeped green. I have never felt so seen and so disappointed at the same time.
Hot desk lottery: you get the one near the printer.
The office WiFi is worse than the WiFi I left at home to come use the office WiFi.
"We need to rebuild company culture." The company culture is a Slack channel called #dogs.
Day one back, I sat next to two people who joined the same Zoom I was on.
"It's only a 35-minute commute." Each way. Times five. Times 48 weeks. Times the rest of my life.
The office has a wellness room. It's a closet with a chair and a sign that says wellness room.
Management said the office would feel energizing again. It feels like a LinkedIn post.
I forgot my badge. Security called my manager. My manager is remote today.
"Mandatory in-office." The two senior VPs are on a beach in Portugal.
The coffee machine has a queue and a Slack channel for outages.
"The kitchen is fully stocked." There are six LaCroix and a banana.
A coworker asked if I wanted to grab lunch. I almost cried.
My calendar said "focus block." I was in the office. I focused on someone else's call.
The whole team came in for one in-person meeting. It was held on Zoom because half the team is in Austin.
RTO email subject: "An exciting new chapter." Reply-all rate: 0.
I drove forty minutes to take a one-on-one in a glass phone booth.
"You miss the spontaneous hallway conversations." The last spontaneous hallway conversation was about the bathroom soap dispenser.
The office dress code is business casual. I have been wearing the same hoodie since March 2020 and nobody has said anything.
There's a sign-up sheet for desks. There's a sign-up sheet for the sign-up sheet.
"Innovation happens in person." The last in-person meeting innovated a new format for status updates.
I came in early to beat traffic. The parking garage was already full. It's a Wednesday.
HR said anchor days build team cohesion. My team has three people in three states.
The office has plants now. They are doing better than I am.
"The new office is collaboration-first." It's an open floor plan with no walls and one phone booth shared by 80 people.
I joined a meeting from the conference room next to the meeting.
Day one back I packed a lunch. Day two I forgot. Day three I ate a granola bar from a drawer.
Real estate quietly drove the whole policy. The lease is up in 2027.
My desk neighbor takes every call on speakerphone. My desk neighbor is the VP of People.
"We measured productivity." The metric was badge swipes.
The all-hands explained why remote work was hurting culture. The all-hands was on Zoom.
I came in to be visible. My skip-level is in Singapore.
Office snacks are now self-service. The bowl has been empty since Monday.
"We're piloting unassigned seating." The pilot is permanent. The unassigned seating is permanent. The pilot is the policy.
I sat in the same row as my manager for the first time in two years. We Slacked each other the entire day.
The office has a quiet zone. The quiet zone has the loudest people in the company.
RTO compliance is tracked by a tool called Insights. The insight is whether you came in.
"Tuesdays and Thursdays are anchor days." Someone added "and Wednesdays for some teams" in week three.
The badge reader is broken. The sign says use the QR code. The QR code goes to a 404.
I commuted ninety minutes to be told the meeting moved to next week.
The new HQ has a barista. The barista is a vending machine.
Open offices were supposed to spark conversation. The only conversation is people apologizing for typing too loud.
"Three days minimum, more strongly encouraged." This is the corporate version of "we should hang out sometime."
Someone proposed Slack-free Wednesdays in person. The proposal was sent in Slack on a Wednesday.
"Culture is built in the hallway." The hallway is a corridor between two stairwells.
I booked a focus room for an hour. Someone walked in to ask if I was using it.
RTO town hall slide: "Together, stronger." Next slide: layoffs.
The office added a mother's room, a nap pod, and a meditation booth. They are all the same closet.
"Voluntary return." Footnote: attendance affects performance ratings.
I came in. I sat down. I opened my laptop. I joined Zoom. The rest of the meeting was on the other side of the floor.
Someone asked me what I do here. We've been on the same team for a year.
The lease ends. The mandate ends. These two facts are unrelated, according to leadership.
I went back to the office and they had moved my chair. That was the whole emotional arc of the year.
Why the RTO joke writes itself
The return-to-office mandate is one of the few corporate decisions where the stated reason and the actual reason are visibly different documents. The memo says collaboration, culture, innovation, spontaneity. The lease says 2027 and costs $4 million a year. Workers can tell. The joke is not that one is true and the other is false. The joke is that everyone has read both documents and nobody is allowed to mention the second one.
What makes the genre durable is that the asymmetry never gets resolved. The CEO writes the memo from home. The mandate gets watered down to three days, then to anchor days, then to anchor days for some teams, then to a metric called badge swipes. Each round of softening is reported as a thoughtful response to feedback. Each round leaves the lease intact. The humor is in the gap between what we are told the building is for and what it actually contains, which is six LaCroix and a banana.
The bigger thing the jokes are doing is naming a kind of double-bind that does not have a good word yet. You can be remote-first as a policy and in-office five days as a culture. You can be told the office is a perk while being told attendance affects your rating. You can sit next to your manager and Slack them all day, and both of you know the meeting that mattered was the one you took in the conference room next to the conference room. The jokes work because the experience is shared and the explanation is not.
See also
- 60 Zoom Meeting Jokes Everyone on Mute Knows: the medium the office was supposed to replace.
- 50 Microsoft Teams Jokes for People Stuck in the App: the corporate-SSO twin of every RTO calendar invite.
- 70 Slack Jokes Every Channel Member Recognizes: the channel where the mandate gets quietly negotiated in DMs.
- 55 HR Jokes Only Employees Who Have Met With HR Get: the people who wrote the memo and the people who answer the questions about the memo.
- 60 Executive Leadership Jokes for People Who Have Sat Through the Keynote: the all-hands where culture gets explained again.
- 50 Quick Call Jokes for the Meeting That Was Not Quick: the meeting you commuted in to take alone.
- 55 Email Chain Jokes for People Stuck on the Thread: the RTO announcement thread, reply-all edition.
Sources
Authoritative references this article was fact-checked against.
- WFH Research, Stanford University (Nick Bloom)wfhresearch.com
- Hybrid Work, Harvard Business Reviewhbr.org