The bygone photos of people in offices

I am visiting the New York City office for my work this week. I am tagging along Kristen on her work trip and decided to into the office. It’s similar to the San Francisco office, has most of the elements, albeit toned down a ton and the population is sparse due to the pandemic.

I’m getting settled into the office and one of the things that really stuck out to me was the fact that there’s photos of people on the walls. Not the photos taken by the office teams (office events teams, front desk people, or anyone like that) for office morale or promoting employees amongst theirselves, but candid shots of someone doing work or two colleagues hanging out talking about something.

The genuine smiles and moments get caught in time and glued to the wall as if these will reoccur but it really makes me wonder, would those past selves of us know how we feel now? In offices with strangers who happen to work at the same company as us but not relateable due to the fact that a 2 year hiatus of being at the office really has made the office just that, a place to work and nothing more.

I went through my old photos and found one of me where it’s meta as it can get, there’s another photo of me working in the same office from a different angle. Young me was an ambitious guy, my desk is still as messy as back then.