The last couple of days have been fun, intense, and tiring at the office. With team offsites, it’s always socializing on steroids, but with this specific offsite, given it’s our very first time all meeting in person, and many of us have been colleagues working at this company for nearly two years, it was even more intense. We were all trying to make up for lost in-person time, and it felt like almost every minute I wasn’t talking with one person, I was talking to another or getting tapped or waved at by yet another person. It felt almost surreal to finally meet all my colleagues I’ve worked with closely over the last two years… finally in person and not in a Zoom box on my computer screen. It was also funny to see how some are much taller or shorter in real life than I had imagined!

I always knew this before, but this week has made me more aware of it: nothing can ever replace in-person meeting and interaction. While Zoom, Google Hangout, and FaceTime can bridge the gap when in-person interaction is not possible, there is nothing more refreshing or revitalizing as people being in the same place and talking and laughing together. I almost felt like I was a new employee here meeting everyone for the first time even though that was clearly not the case at all. Our team has a really good, healthy vibe, and I’m grateful to work among people where toxicity does not even remotely exist, and where we actually do all have good intentions and support each other both in and outside of work. This is the healthiest, most balanced workplace I’ve ever been in for the last 14+ years of working. It feels good to be an employee here.

At the last company plus my current company where I work, all the offices have had rotating snacks in every kitchen, ranging from healthy to very unhealthy to “I want to seem like I am healthy and also trendy and charge you a lot to eat me” snacks. Because beyond middle school, I haven’t really been a huge snacker at all. I’ve mostly discovered snacks I’ve enjoyed through work, my friend who works at Trader Joe’s, or Chris through his obsession for Australian Arnott’s and other snacks down under.

Well, today was my very first time being in an office in about 2.5 years — since the first week of March 2020, when the last company saw its very first COVID cases, and we shut down every global office. And since I work remotely full time, being in an office will continue to be a novelty for me as long as I work here. So of course, I took advantage of things I normally don’t get, like socializing time with colleagues I was finally meeting for the very first time… plus SNACKS. ENDLESS SNACKS AND DRINKS.

Lemonade that is lightly sweetened with local honey in the Southern U.S., cane sugar, and “not too sweet” in Mark Wiens’s voice? An entire mango dried, or a half pineapple dried into what looks like a strip of fruit leather, with zero additives, not a single preservative and no sugar? Chicken skin “chips” that resemble pork rinds? Endless types of Kind nut bars? I was even reunited with Tea’s Tea jasmine green tea in a bottle, which I used to always have at my last company when I was in the office full time. Going to the office is not only a novelty now to see and socialize with colleagues, but also simply to explore the snack selection to see what is on offer. A comedian I follow on Instagram recently joked that one of the biggest perks of working in an office was free printing; while that is definitely true (especially since we live in Manhattan with limited space where pretty much no one owns a printer) and extremely useful, what is also true is… who is going to turn down free food?

In preparation for my upcoming trip to the San Francisco office, we had a list of to-dos before we arrive, including a few apps to download, a health questionnaire I need to fill out daily before I arrive at the office (to ensure I am COVID negative, or as close to negative as can be), and to get the Zerocater food ordering app downloaded onto my phone. I’d never heard of Zerocater before and wasn’t quite sure why I had to download any food app for my work trip, as when I heard that food was catered at work, I figured it was like the way it was at my last company when I came, where there would be buffet-style food laid out for us to eat at specific time blocks, and that would be it.

Zerocater is not like that, though: you actually have options from a handful of local restaurants every single day your company sponsors lunch, and from those restaurants, you can choose select dishes to get. This does a few good things: 1) it supports local restaurants and businesses directly instead of stealing business away from them, 2) it eliminates the inevitable food waste that comes from buffet-style eating, 3) you can order the quantity of food (by weight) that you request, which even further minimizes waste. The app is really customized: it presents a number of mains and sides (with lots of details and photos) and asks how you would like them as options. Then, based on your feedback, it creates recommendations for you based on what you’ve indicated you like. After I finished this quick questionnaire, it seemed to sum up my food tastes as leaning heavily towards Asian, South American, and Mexican cuisine. Vietnamese cuisine also got especially called out. Not bad at all.

It’s been a while since I’ve been in an office and had the opportunity to enjoy catered food, and seeing how customized it is now and anti-waste it is makes me happy. There are some perks I do miss that you get while working in the office, and free lunch is definitely one of them.

So, as we’ve transitioned from being in a pandemic to being in an endemic, work travel is now considered acceptable and encouraged. Not all customers are accepting visitors, though, so it varies depending on the customer we’re working with. However, a colleague and I were asked to come onsite to visit a customer of ours in Bridgewater, New Jersey, today, and so we decided to go. My colleague only lives about a 20 minute drive away, but I had to get there via New Jersey Transit, which took me over an hour, not including the travel time to get to Penn Station. That commute took longer than expected due to a train delay, though. And then coming back, I missed the train I wanted to get on because my meeting ran long, and so I had to take a train that had a longer transfer time at Newark Penn Station. So all in all, I spent almost 3.5 hours traveling for a meeting that lasted about 90 minutes. While I was on NJ Transit this late afternoon coming back into the city, I was thinking about exactly how ridiculous this was. That commute time doesn’t even factor in the amount of time I spent this morning getting ready and dressed, or the time it took me to look up train schedules and figure out the best way to get there. In addition, I had to wake up earlier and pump earlier, then pump right before I left to go. My breasts don’t care that I have to travel for work; they still need to be emptied. And of course, I came home with my breasts uncomfortable and full of milk.

It’s true: in-person meetings cannot be replaced by virtual meetings. But they certainly take a LOT more preparation and leg work to do, and as a pumping mom and someone who has gotten used to working from home the last 2.5 years, this trip, though relatively short with no overnight stay, was still taxing. I just could not imagine doing this type of work travel regularly; I would be so miserable.

It was my first day back at work today, which really meant I had to be at my computer in the second bedroom most of the day, and it was pretty quiet. I only had one meeting with my manager, and the rest of the day was spent doing compliance trainings, reading through new product material, and more trainings around product enablement and new roles and responsibilities. I had a few Slack messages with some colleagues, and that was really it. Given I didn’t have to go back into an actual workplace, it wasn’t as jarring as I thought it would be.

My manager told me that we’re likely having an offsite, either in San Francisco or Denver in August. It would be for about two days. So I immediately started thinking about breast milk transport logistics through the airport, on the plane, and at a hotel. And I immediately started feeling stress about it, especially given the horror stories I’ve read about from pumping moms going through TSA and dealing with clueless and ignorant flight attendants about baggage allowances. These are the things that I never thought much about when becoming a mom that I now have to think about just to feed my baby. What adventures await.

In a world pre-baby, the thought of traveling to San Francisco or Denver for work would have excited me and made me happy. More travel! More miles! More points! Status! Socializing! Now in a new life with a baby, I just feel wary and unsure.