I was one of the early birds because I had to come before rush hours (5 pm-8pm) when my car is banned from the streets (Monday, my car plate ends in 1). I parked at the hotel and walked to High Street to work in some nearby restaurant. I was on editing duty today so it was a non-stop flow of stories that needed major fixes. 🥴

My main reason for going out tonight is to see more friends from the industry whom I haven’t seen that much this year–and of course the past two years. I had non-stop conversations with some of the editors with whom I needed to touch base. Right after I arrived, I opened my laptop to do some minor tweaks to a story I had been laboring over for a few hours earlier. One editor said, “Aha! I just finished my final edit right before you came.” That’s usually our greeting to each other; we usually ask, “When are you going to close your storefront?” This translates to: When will you do your last edit/end your editing shift? Are you free now to socialize/do non-work related stuff? Because we editors are normally tied to our “desks”. I put it in quotation marks because “desks” not long ago were literally the physical desks in our publications’ office. Now our “desk” means anywhere we can put our laptops with Internet connection. It’s only during and after the lockdowns news editors were finally allowed to work from home. Before Covid, news editors were required to be physically present in the newsroom so we can supervise the layout and be within cursing distance of other editors. Rain or shine. In my case when I was still with a newspaper, floods or heatwaves.

Covid changed all that.

I asked T, one of the editors I often see and talk with in some events, if she is still required to come to the editorial offices and she adamantly replied, NOOOOO! And every time they have editorial meetings, the topic of working from home constantly crops up and she keeps on campaigning to make this arrangement permanent.

There’s little reason for us to come to the office and face the traffic jam and the high Grab fares. Newsrooms can function like this, as proven by Covid. Your reporters are in the field anyway.

Oh wait, reporters are now house reporters. It used to be a derogatory term for lazy reporters who don’t do the rounds in their beat and seldom cover events. Now, we are legally house reporters and nobody bats an eyelash.

The PR firm that helped arrange this event has given up its physical office since the team realized that it’s more efficient for them to work remotely. Each employee can save money and time and can be more productive this way. The owner of the PR firm said he is weighing if he should just buy one small condo unit just to have an address. I said you can just rent from Regus or other co-working spaces and get the service that offers an office address and a phone number for business registration purposes. I told him that I was thinking of doing the same years before but good thing I didn’t push for it since it was useless… We could just use the Singapore office address for whatever reason.

Now our new business cards just sport our names, job title, our publication, email addresses and mobile number (or Wechat, WhatsApp or LinkedIn). We no longer have physical addresses printed. We’re all floating anyway, and this is especially true for our Singapore office. We all just hot-desk and many of us elect to just work from home.

The corp comm head of the host for this evening’s party also said that their hybrid setup has become permanent. They just hot-desk in their new office and just maintain lockers. It saves them floor space and time. They’re a tech company now anyway, so better make everything digital and cloud-based.

And remote working makes gatherings like this more meaningful. We make an effort to come and have conversations with our hosts and with friends from the industry.

Nice to see them all.