I went on vacation last week and came back to a changed office.
Lori’s cubicle was empty. Somebody else was in Charlie’s chair. The place bustled along as usual — reporters on the phone and the computers, Paris and Barack still inciting headlines — so it was hard to pinpoint instantly who else was among the missing.
But absence, when it’s fresh, is tangible, and I could feel the holes.
The buyouts were official, confirmed a colleague.
One day last week, she said, she kept hearing little explosions of applause here and there in the newsroom, and though she couldn’t always see who was leaving, she knew that each distant round of clapping signaled another familiar person walking one last time toward the door.
That’s how it goes in the land of work. Offices are organisms. They mutate. They shed skins.
People who once seemed as permanent as the bathroom fixtures retire, expire, switch jobs, leave to have babies or surgeries or just to smell the petunias.
It happens all the time, in all kinds of offices, a process as inevitable as birth and death and a dip in the Dow. Change is nature’s law.
Right now at the Tribune, the leave-takers are part of the kind of staff reduction happening at newspapers all over the country, “staff reduction” being lingo for the combined squeeze of attrition, buyouts and layoffs occasioned by profit pressures and the Internet revolution.
Most of the people in my office are going what we call “voluntarily” and with enough buyout money to live for a while while they ponder how to live from now on. At some other papers, the leave-taking is about as voluntary as having a healthy arm amputated with a dirty machete.
Whatever the reason for people leaving an office, any office, their leaving leaves a hole.
For a day. Or a month.
Then the office adapts. The holes get filled in about as fast as a grave. Sentiment soon gets buried too. No time in an office for long, sloppy wakes.
New people arrive at the old desks. They tack their own photos to the cubicle walls, tuck their own hand lotion in the drawers and otherwise settle into someone else’s space with the confidence of lifetime landlords.
If you’ve worked in the same office for a while, you’ve seen some version of this transition, and it’s probably taught you three related lessons.
One: Workers come and go, but the office goes on.
Two: That thing they always say on the going-away card about how the office will never be the same without the person who’s going? Yes, it will.
Three: But not for everyone, not all the time.
No matter how quickly the departed seem to be forgotten, their ghosts appear occasionally to the people who knew them in the flesh.
Some days, when I’m in the Tribune elevator, I still see the late, great columnist Mike Royko lope in with a curt nod, maybe a hello, and watch him ride up to the fourth floor staring mutely at the crack between the doors.
Other days, as I’m walking up the front steps to the Tower, I catch a glimpse of Yuenger. Jim was his first name but he was the kind of guy you felt better calling by his last name, a foreign correspondent and editor and bon vivant who stood smoking outdoors in his shirt sleeves even in the jaws of winter.
Bob’s ghost saunters by sometimes too, carrying that ridiculous giant zucchini he liked to parade past the in-house CLTV camera.
The new people in an office don’t see the ghosts because they never knew them, never smelled their cologne or their office lunches, never laughed or winced at their jokes, never eavesdropped on their phone conversations or helped them solve a problem.
But the office ghosts live on as long as people who knew them are in the office. For a while to come, some people around here will still hear Mitch or Ken picking up the phone and saying, “Copy desk,” or Charlie striding through the newsroom one last time, wearing his guitar.
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mschmich@tribune.com
