Seattle Office Raid Day

[Icon is of Reese.]

Today I was flaring so I didn’t participate in the exciting events…

Reese & Sleep are visiting for Memorial Day weekend through Tuesday. Today, they got into Reese’s pickup truck and drove with Cat to Seattle to raid Cat’s old office for office supplies and furniture.

Cat’s employer realized it was cheaper to run the business without the overhead cost of an office, as the pandemic work-from-home showed it was not only possible, but easy. Their lease runs out at the end of June, so the boss told employees they could pick up any left over computers, desks, chairs and so forth. Anything left by the end of the month will be thrown away!

So… every June weekend, employees who live locally (many now live in other states, like Texas and California) are allowed to visit their old office and take what they can. Cat– of course– arranged to get there early to grab one of those up-and-down desks for Reese’s sister, Rhonda, and VERY nice desk chairs for Reese and Sleep, as well as all kinds of office supplies from post-it notes to paper clips, pens, and pencils. All free!

Something worth mentioning too was how the security guards were used to office people coming and just taking shit from the offices! Cat peeled away at one point to visit some other offices on the same floor and it was completely empty! What had been a bustling office space full of people in February of 2020 was completely deserted by the summer of 2022.

Cat found out from the security guards that this was true all over this skyscraper in Seattle, and they had heard it was similar for many other buildings. Some of the skyscrapers are renting out office space as server farms for the internet now, and that use was expanding as regular office workers and businesses were leaving. Like many other down town areas, Seattle lost most of their office workers over the course of the pandemic, and maybe half of them haven’t returned and seem unlikely to…

Which has HUGE implications for the normal white collar worker who can work from home using the internet. So many people had to leave the workforce (another topic for another day but — 20% of people who got COVID, even with mild symptoms, ended up with Long Covid. It’s over 25% for those who never took the vaccine…) that now companies are scrambling to hire people, and people don’t want to waste money on expensive commutes when they don’t have to! And production goes UP for most people who work from home, the numbers don’t lie!

But white collar workers not being in downtown areas of cities has led to much higher crime rates. In addition, the services, like restaurants, that fed and entertained office workers downtown for lunch or after work have closed at astronomical rates for want of enough customers. Anyone can go to a major city downtown these days and see what I mean. The homeless problem was already bad, but after the pandemic–? It’s like tent cities are EVERYWHERE which is even less incentive to want to go downtown.

Downtowns are fucking dying.