The Two Trips a Year I Make to the Regional Office

Twice a year, roughly, I fly out to the regional office I’m nominally attached to, and every time someone asks why I bother when the job is entirely remote anyway, and every time I give a slightly different answer because I’m honestly still not sure which one is true. The official reason is a training refresher, some in-person requirement that could probably be a video call but isn’t, for reasons nobody’s ever fully explained to me. The real reason, I think, is closer to wanting to remember that the work connects to actual other people rather than a queue of documents that could, most days, have come from anywhere.

The trip itself has developed its own small shape over the years. A book I’ve been saving specifically for the flight, never something I’m mid-read on already, always something new I want a clean uninterrupted block of hours for. I’ve finished more books at thirty thousand feet than I’d like to admit given how little I actually enjoy flying. There’s a specific kind of focus that happens when the alternative to reading is staring at a seatback, and I’ve apparently trained myself to associate airports with getting real reading done, which is a strange thing to notice about yourself in your thirties.

The office itself, once I’m there, is mostly unremarkable, fluorescent lighting, the same training modules I could technically do from home, colleagues I recognize more from video calls than in person, which produces a specific disorientation, like meeting someone’s voice attached to a body for the first time. I always mean to explore the city a little more than I do and mostly don’t, another trip passed and another one just like it waiting a few months out, tired in the specific way travel makes you tired even when you haven’t done anything physically demanding.

What I’ve come to actually value about it, past the training itself, is the reminder that the careful, slow reading I do all day has a chain of real people at the other end of it, not just an abstract queue. It’s easy to forget that from a home office in Duluth with the snow coming down outside the window. Two trips a year isn’t much. It’s apparently enough to keep the reminder working.