W-what? Why? Seriously, what sort of message is this supposed to impart? The 'Seriously, we missed you' sign makes it seem like a corps genuinely trying to welcome everyone back in and rebuild an 'office culture'
But the other two are genuinely mean spirited? 'hey are you glad we get to tell you how to dress again?' and 'you enjoyed working with your pets i bet, fucking loser'
I would actually be boiling with rage. I'm never going back to the fuckin office, especially not now that it seems it's a possibility they're going to demean me lol
They live entirely in their own world where all of this is completely naturalized and there's nothing but irony in the "lol fuck mondays" type of sterilized complaining about the world you can do while maintaining social niceties at work.
Remember Cato the Elder treatise about agriculture especially the part about slaves? Those are those type of people, they just cannot literally whip you anymore so they pass the time inventing new ways of psychical abuse.
If you put real valid complaints into sleek advertising and posters, it normalizes them. It says, "You being forced to wear uncomfortable clothes, and spend most of your one precious life around people you do not love, is a normal human experience. Just as normal and inoffensive as all the other advertising and relatable memes you see every day." In the same way you ignore the ads, and make mundane and ordinary the things you hear over and over again, they say: Ignore your discomfort. Do not let it sit unintegrated in your mind for so long that it drives you to reflection, or god forbid, to action. This is how you should react to these feelings. This is how every one of your coworkers, putting up these signs without protest, placidly walking through these doors after you, has reacted.
Advertiser's are trying to relate to their target audience. A lot of the ads i public transit were anti RTO as well lol. I remember a kind of silly common wisdom that the best way to measure public opinion is to look at how advertisements try to relate to the public because it's very important for them to resonate with the median person. Well, wonder what literally every ad hating RTO says .
Aside but at my old job we almost lost a client because the account managers were so bought into the RTO is good corporate line, they completely failed to read the room and realize that the guy we're dealing with did not want to be reminded about RTO pressures, lmao.
The only option would do be take your sweatpants and your dog (emotional support animal for workplace ptsd) to the office, except your dog isn’t a real ESA it’s one of Biden’s rapid German shepards and he loves the taste of Armani suits