☕️ (R)emote Expresso #71

☕️ (R)emote Expresso is global. Remote. Slightly feral. Weekly.

There is a chicken in Minneapolis that has been smuggled onto a stage for 34 years.

She started in 1991 as a paper-mâché prop with pheasant feathers, built by two women named Mary and Kathryn for a production of The Grand Duke. She was supposed to be breakfast. The next year, Mary carried her across the stage during the closing performance of Iolanthe, just for fun. That was it. The Chicken has appeared in the final performance of every show my company has produced since.

I have been in that company, off and on, since the mid-90s. I left Minneapolis for Houston for fifteen years. I came back. The Chicken was still there. She has been eaten by mice, decapitated by children, replaced twice, and once someone built her a nest on top of a pergola that the director made them take down. Audiences in on it play "Spot the Chicken" during the final performance. Audiences not in on it see nothing.

If you asked the cast why we keep doing this, the honest answer is we don't know. There is no meaning. The company website literally uses the phrase "Precious nonsense!" as the official explanation.

So. I have a chicken tradition that has outlasted my first marriage, three apartments, a move to a different state, and several theater directors. And also, separately, there is a rock on my desk.

I did not buy the rock. I did not find it. I cannot tell you when it arrived. It has been present for every Zoom call, every Slack message, every small 2pm spiral since roughly February. If I moved it, something bad would happen. Not something real. Something vibey. It has seniority.

These are the same thing.

Theater companies have rituals built in. You don't whistle backstage. You don't say Macbeth inside a theater. You warm up in a circle. You do the half-hour call. You say "merde" or "break a leg" but not "good luck." Nobody hands you a pamphlet. You learn them because a stage manager looks at you funny one time and says we don't do that here.

Remote work gave us none of this.

There is no stage manager on Zoom. No call time. Nobody doing a circle warmup before the 9am with the new client. You sit down at your kitchen table, open your laptop, and whatever you used to do to shift into work-mode is now a private problem you have to solve alone.

Most of us solved it by accident. The specific mug. The walk around the block before hitting send on the hard email. The candle you never actually light. The rock that showed up.

These are not cute. They're the closest thing we have to a stage manager.

Without a signal, the workday never starts and it never ends. It just smears.

That's the easy part of the loss.

You ship a thing. You close the tab. You make dinner. In the theater there'd be a strike party. A cast photo. Somebody's basement with cheap wine and everyone still half in costume. Online there is you, the tab, the kitchen. That thing you worked on for three months is now gone and the ground under your feet feels exactly the same as it did in August when nothing was happening.

You get a promotion. You post it on LinkedIn. 53 people you don't know click a button. Your body would like there to be cake.

You have a brutal call with your boss. In an office you'd walk slowly back to your desk and somebody would see your face and hand you a granola bar. In the theater you'd go stand in the alley behind the stage door with whoever else was having a day. On Zoom you close the laptop and the dog is still asleep and the kitchen is still the kitchen and you're supposed to make lunch now.

A colleague leaves. Not fired. Just going. In an office there's a card, a cake, a last-day lunch, too many hugs. In the theater there's a closing night and you cry in the parking lot. On Slack they get removed from the channel on a Friday afternoon and by Monday, gone.

Nobody handed us new rituals. We've been winging it. The rock is you winging it.

Look at your desk right now.

What’s there that you didn't put there on purpose? The half-burned candle you've never lit. The pen you never use but won't throw out. The mug you "forgot" to wash. The rock.

Pick one. Just one. Now give it a job title.

Mine is Boulder, Director of Vibes. He reports to nobody. He has been present for all major decisions since February. His performance reviews are excellent because I write them.

Now notice if you feel stupid.

That feeling is the ghost of an office that told you rituals had to come from HR. That feeling is a stage manager you internalized who would have looked at you funny. Let it pass. The chicken has been on that stage for 34 years and nobody made it go through onboarding.

Here's the thing about The Chicken that I've been underselling: it only works because other people know.

Mary smuggling a chicken across the stage alone is just a woman with a chicken. Mary smuggling a chicken across the stage while three cast members try not to break character and Wendy Evans hisses "they've got that damned chicken!" from the wings - that's the ritual. The audience of nerds in row G playing Spot the Chicken - that's the ritual. The fact that Chicken III is sitting in a storage box somewhere waiting for her turn - that's the ritual.

The rock on your desk is doing work. But a rock on your desk that only you know about is a habit. A rock on your desk that six people in your Slack know about, whose name you've told them, whose job title they've agreed to respect - that's starting to be a thing.

Remote work didn't just strip the rituals. It stripped the people who would've witnessed them.

We have to rebuild both.

You don't have to build a 34-year tradition by Friday. The Chicken started because two women thought it'd be funny to put a paper-mâché bird on a breakfast table. That's the whole origin story.

Pick one. Or two. Do it this week.

You're allowed to make these up. Nobody's coming to hand them to you. That was the whole thing we lost, and we're going to have to be weirder than the office ever was to get any of it back.

This month's guest creator is Isabel Novais Machado, a design leader with 15+ years in telecommunications, data, and finance - which sounds dry until you realize she's spent her career chasing one question: how do you get from a spark of an idea to something real that people actually use?

That question isn't just for products. How you design a product, how you design a team culture, how you design a life - the mechanics are pretty much the same. You start messy. You explore. You narrow. You ship. You explore again. Rinse. Repeat.

Isabel's workshop was scheduled for this week but we've bumped it to next week to give her more time to cook. Keep an eye on Circle for the updated date. We'll have the full rundown here next week.

Worth showing up.

I wrote a thing in Circle this week called "The void writes back." Short version: I got admin access, and for the first time since I started writing this newsletter 13 months ago, I can see what you send back. There were humans out there the whole time. Who knew.

I asked a question over there that I'm asking here too: what's something you'd actually reply to? Not "more content." A specific thread, prompt, or question that'd pull you out of lurker mode and into the conversation.

While you're there, drop a photo of the weird object on your desk. Name it. Give it a job title. Bonus points for a performance review.

Juiciest entries might just make it into a future Expresso.

The Chicken was not a plan. Nobody held a meeting about it. There is no documentation. Mary just walked onstage with a paper-mâché bird in 1992 because she thought it would be funny, and now it's 34 years later and we're still doing it.

The best rituals are mostly accidents that got repeated on purpose.

So whatever weird thing you did this week that made you laugh or made your body exhale or made a coworker send back a single question mark - do it again next week. That's how traditions start.

— The (R) Generation Team 💻 🧡 🫶

PS: If you've named your rock, you're ahead of 98% of knowledge workers. If you've given your rock a direct report, seek help. Loving help. The kind your rock would want for you.

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☕️ (R)emote Expresso is published weekly for R Generation - a global community of remote professionals, designers, product people, facilitators, consultants, and freelancers who believe remote work should fit the human, not the other way around.