The 62-year-old, who lives in Southern California, managed the back end of his company's customer-service operations. When the pandemic hit, many employees at his company started working from home.
"At first when they said, oh, you could work from home for a couple weeks, I thought, cool," Bond said. "I even said, oh, I'm going to get to work from home."
"I would find myself going out and being in the backyard, talking to my family, and I'd go, oh God, I got to go back in, I'm at work!" he said.
Lunches turned into running errands, and he'd be jolted back to the reality that he was working. He also said it was harder to get things done without his large workstation from the office, with just a laptop and a phone.
"After about, I don't know, day four or five, I'm like, ugh," he said. "By the end of it I was like, oh, I can't wait to get back to the office."
At first it seemed there would be an end to his isolation; he went back in as early as he could during the pandemic, adhering to guidance around distancing and masking.
But then his firm said it was planning to go fully remote. For Bond, that was the final straw. He decided to retire early. He's now been retired for nearly two years.
Remote work is "just not for me," he said. "It's just not something I want to do. I don't want to bring my work home."
