Whenever I walked into a small country town I looked for ‘award winning’ signs. These were usually written on folding boards standing outside bakeries letting passers-by know they had the best pies, vanilla slices, or scones in town. I trusted these accreditations more than the TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence stickers on shop windows.

At the end of one day’s walk, I was lured into a teashop by an ‘award winning scones’ sign. And it was true, the scones were good, but the true winner was the home grown, homemade, blood-plum jam. Hoping I could have it again for breakfast I asked the elderly lady minding the shop about opening times. “Between 10 and 10:30am, depending how fast my dog walks” she said, pointing to a dog sprawled on the shop floor. Judging by the old dog’s appearance, opening time would be closer to 11am.

I mentioned my planned 6am departure and she directed me to a two-tier stack of jars of blood-plum jam for sale. Clearly, I wasn’t the first person to have complimented her jam. After debating if a jar of jam was a worthy contributor to my Sisyphus’ boulder, I decided to pass up the opportunity.

She then said, “sometimes memories are just as good,” and her expression took on a faraway look. She continued,

when I was 10, I was in Alicante [Spain] with my Mum. We were sitting at a restaurant next to the beach and a group of young boys had gone spearfishing and caught some octopus for us. They came back past us and proudly showed them to Mum and me on their way to the kitchen. I was disgusted by the slimy things, but Mum told me I needed to be polite and eat it when it was served.

And just like that, the elderly lady snapped back to where we were and went silent. Intrigued by where this conversation was heading, I asked if she had enjoyed the octopus.

“I can’t remember,” she replied, going back behind the shop counter, “but I do remember Alicante because of the octopus.”

I never quite understood what she was trying to tell me, but the conversation influenced my thoughts during the rest of my pilgrimage. As I walked, I entertained myself imagining employees’ arrival times at the office determined by how fast their pet could walk. Smiling I chuckled at how the all-too-common bottle necks we see in the morning in the foyers of office buildings in the city could be solve in this low-tech way.

And the octopus? Forget coordinates on a map, just use food to pinpoint locations.

My thinking reminded me of the frog and elephant-like ideas I had entertained 2 years earlier during my sleepless night after that flight back from Sydney. I imagined if that elderly lady had evolved in her own Galapagos Island, she might have developed a time-space construct based on pets and food. In such a world, people would make plans to catch up at the corner of plums and carrots when Mary’s cat returns. This led me to think about their notion of work and their workplaces, and the subsequent societies they would spawn.

The thoughts were absurd, silly, and unnecessary. But so too is standing in a packed lobby waiting for a lift in the morning because no one has bothered to question the logic of an ingrained habit.

These absurdities can be summarised in the following signposts:

figure a
figure b

I am sure we can all think of something silly, even unnecessary, at our workplace which has been normalised simply because it remains unquestioned. Examples others have shared include questioning why we need to go to the same place over and over to work from 9 to 5.

Undoubtedly, there were many negatives of COVID-19, but one positive was that it not only challenged the status quo, but also proved we could do things differently and effectively.