On the day we started working from home in March 2020, nobody packed anything. We left the office at 250 University Avenue the way you would leave it on any normal evening. Laptops came home. Everything else, the monitors and other equipment, and the personal things that accumulate at a desk, stayed behind. We didn’t know how long this would last. Nobody did.
It took a few weeks for us to accept that we wouldn’t be returning anytime soon. The province had declared a state of emergency, non-essential workplaces were ordered closed, and every projection about when things might reopen kept getting pushed further out.
By the end of April, I ended our lease. The desks and chairs belonged to iQ Offices, so leaving was simple. Team members went back on their own, whenever it suited them, to retrieve their belongings. There was no group goodbye and no last look around. One by one, we collected our things, and that was that.