A 62-year-old Southern California man opted to retire early — and forego his six-figure salary — rather than being forced to work from home.
Charles Bond told Insider he decided to quit after nearly three decades because he missed being in the office — where he managed the back end of the unidentified company’s customer-service operations.
“At first when they said, oh, you could work from home for a couple weeks, I thought, cool,” Bond said.
“I even said, oh, I’m going to get to work from home.”
But after just a few weeks, something was amiss.
“I would find myself going out and being in the backyard, talking to my family, and I’d go, oh God, I got to go back in, I’m at work!” he told Insider.
Bond said that having a laptop and a phone at home made it more difficult to get things done compared to the office, where he had a workstation.
“After about, I don’t know, day four or five, I’m like, ugh,” he said.
“By the end of it I was like, oh, I can’t wait to get back to the office.”
During the pandemic, Bond said he went back to the office as early as he could, according to Insider.
But when his company went fully remote, he decided to put in for early retirement.
Working from home was “just not for me,” according to Bond.
“It’s just not something I want to do. I don’t want to bring my work home.”
Bond said that even his six-figure wage couldn’t sway him to to go back to work remotely.
“I need to be around people. I enjoyed my team. I worked there 27 years,” he said.
“There were people there that had worked there just as long as me, if not longer. They were like a family. They were like my second family.”
Bond added: “I wasn’t planning on retiring as early, but for me it was worth it, you know?”
“And belt-tightening is fine.”
While more companies are calling their employees back to the office, federal data suggests that remote work has become more common since the pandemic.
The implications of the shift are broad. The economy emerging from the depths of the pandemic will be more technology-driven and less reliant on in-person transactions, leaving jobs permanently changed and potentially fewer in number, according to experts.
“This is the surge in (work-from-home) which is leading firms to spend heavily on connectivity,” said Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom.
Bloom and his colleagues have been surveying 5,000 US residents monthly, and found that from May to December about half of paid work hours were done from home.
Commerce Department data released last week indicates that as spending on home-building has risen, spending on nonresidential construction has dropped, with that on commercial, manufacturing and office space slumping to under 15% of total construction outlays in March.
Meanwhile, spending on technology rose, with investments in software and information processing equipment contributing more than 1 percentage point to the economy’s overall 6.4% annualized rise in economic output in the quarter, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Technology spending has added to growth in all but two of the past 32 quarters, back to 2013. Spending on structures has pulled GDP downward in 14 of those quarters.
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