The pandemic is “over” – sort of. But one big question it generated is here to stay: should we ever go back to the office? It’s a question I have been asking myself for 18 years.

My technology consulting company went fully virtual in 2005. Prior to that we – I ran the business with my father – had an office in a suburban neighborhood of Philadelphia. When my father passed away I started to spend more time in the office and I realized something: the office wasn’t so great.

Clients preferred to meet about their projects in their offices, where they could bring together more of their team, so our employees were either at clients’ offices or working from home (yes, people did that in 2005). Other than a coffee maker and a cat, not a lot was going on. I shut the offices down and we became a fully virtual company. A very, very dysfunctional company.

Sure, our overhead became much lower thanks to not paying rent or all the costs of maintaining an office but – initially – it was a pain. Those were the days of dial-up connections, ISDN lines and broadband. No Salesforce, Teams, Zoom, Slack, Gmail. Our company’s accounting and other databases were kept on a server in the basement of my house, precariously close to that same cat’s litter box.

All of that has improved of course. And the ease of virtual working means it’s here to stay. Gallup expects fully remote work arrangements to nearly triple compared with 2019 figures.

But running a fully virtual business still isn’t any better today than it was in 2005 and – long term – I can tell you it has issues. And then some.

First, closing the office should have cut my overhead. It has and it hasn’t. I no longer have to pay rent and utilities, nor do I have to maintain a coffee machine and pay a cleaning service or all the other expenses required to maintain an office. Instead I’m forking out endless, ever-increasing sub