People Online Are Pretending They’re Back In the Office Together After Bidding Farewell to the Watercooler

The 1999 movie Office Space captured the humdrum existence of life in cubicle land complete with florescent lights, a relentless workday monotony, and a printer that is always jammed. Fast forward to 2020 when the coronavirus has lead to a wave of unemployment, shuttered offices across the country, and many people working from home for the foreseeable future (if not forever). Now, some people are actually day dreaming about office life and a Facebook group is helping them recapture that familiar feeling from the comfort and safety of their own homes.

The private Facebook group has the very apt name of “A group where we all pretend to work in the same office.” It has a simple mission: to complain about a fictional dead-end job as much as possible. The rules of the group require staying in character and keeping posts office-related with the group’s founders acting as human resources, fielding complaints about virtual colleagues.

While the group was founded around 11 months ago, as states issued stay-at-home orders and people bid farewell to their watercoolers and cubicles and the rest of their in-office lives, at some point folks must have started feeling nostalgic about offices, because membership in the group spiked, according to Mashable. Now they have nearly 150,000 members all pretending to work the same dead-end jobs in the same florescent-lit office. One of the group’s administrator’s told Mashable that the rapid growth in group membership is due “to a universal desire for stability“ even if that stability is incredibly dull.

It’s almost like the Office Space writers were wrong when they claimed that, “Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements.” Turns out that sitting in a cubicle, virtual or not, is providing some comfort during a pandemic.