Returning Workers Confront Creepy Time Capsules of Pre-Pandemic Life

Upon closer inspection, he realized it was no pine cone. It was the apple he didn’t have a hand to grab that afternoon 18 months ago when he was sent to work from home due to the pandemic.

“I thought for sure that someone would have thrown that out,” he said.

Though millions of workers remain fully remote, those who are returning to office life say it can be like stumbling into a bizarre corporate Pompeii. Wall calendars are still set to 2020. Desktop computers reveal browser tabs open to news pages about a novel coronavirus that could keep people home for several weeks. Vending machines and desk drawers house snacks that are long expired—but might technically still be safe to eat.

Mr. Weaver only went into his office because his employer is moving to a “hoteling” model, where workers sign up online for desk space. Because employees no longer have individual workstations, he had to clean out his old one. While packing up, he opted not to taste the liquid that had leaked out of the apple and was dripping onto the floor, though a co-worker dared him. Instead he scooted the shriveled fruit into a trash bin with a piece of paper and left the puddle seeping around his old laptop.

“I was running late,” he said. “The computer is technically not mine anymore.”

Ben van der Pluijm, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Michigan, said he popped into his office a handful of times to pick up teaching materials but he hasn’t actually done work there since the pandemic began. In late August, he turned on his desktop for the first time in a year and a half for a Zoom meeting.

“There was no Zoom on it,” he said of his office computer. “I had to sit there and download Zoom after a year and half of sitting on Zoom.”

Lisa Boulanger, an associate professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, returned to campus in August to find her 18-month-old research notes on an office whiteboard. She grabbed an eraser to wipe it clean, but it was as though her words had become immortal.

“It didn’t even smear it around,” she said. “I had to go get a solvent.”

Ms. Boulanger also happened upon two packages of Cadbury creme eggs in a desk drawer. The seasonal Easter candy was from the spring of 2020. Finding them, she says, was like discovering hidden treasure. She ate the eggs—which tasted a bit chewy—before she could think too hard about it or look for an expiration date.

“I didn’t want to know,” she said.

Then there are the critter sightings. One worker returning to her office in Midtown Manhattan recently found three sealed boxes of Girl Scout cookies, and one open sleeve of thin mints. Surrounding the thin mints were tiny mounds that resembled dirt. An ant colony had moved in.

Susan Arango, a workplace experience manager for a call tracking and analytics platform, kept finding dead bees on the floor of her company’s Santa Barbara office when she checked on the building periodically throughout the pandemic. Earlier this year, she called a bee removal and relocation company to investigate. The technician found a hive between the walls with more than 20,000 bees in it. Once removed, pest control estimated the hive contained about 10 gallons of honey.

Ms. Arango’s company, Invoca, toyed with the idea of bottling the honey and gifting it to its workers, but the bee-removal service said they couldn’t handle such a request.

“It’s not as easy as just scooping a bunch of honey out,” Ms. Arango said.

Kristy Taylor, who works at Ontario’s Ministry of Health, was recently recalled to her Toronto office tower to work in person one or two days a week. On her first day back, the office space resembled the 1986 film “Little Shop of Horrors,” she said. An aloe plant had spread across most of a filing cabinet and a pothos had grown over a cubicle and onto the floor.

“It’s like they’ve grown, fallen over, and kept growing on other things,” she said. “This is not how plants should look.”

Ms. Taylor learned that the security guards had been watering the plants in the common areas but not pruning them. When she walked into her individual office, she found her own plant had died of thirst. In her mini-fridge, she found expired yogurt and some pepperoni sticks that actually looked edible.

“I did decide against it, but I thought about it,” she said.

On Ms. Taylor’s desk, there was a sticky note she’d scribbled to herself during a meeting in March of 2020, the week before the staff was sent home. It read: “I’m bored.” Ms. Taylor says that since then her work at the health department has entirely revolved around the pandemic, and that she’s more or less been working around the clock.

“I was like, ‘Oh, my God, remember when I was bored?’ ” she said. “It’s almost impossible to remember what my job was before Covid.”