(FORTUNE Magazine) – Roughly half of us could be working mainly from our homes by the year 2000, according to Link Resources, a New York City market research firm. That means it's going to be either you or me at home--and I'm praying it isn't me. Because I've got a little secret: I love working in an office. I suspect a lot of other people do too.

The office gives us discipline, structure, and social interaction--not to mention freebies such as rollerball pens and No. 2 pencils, pristine pads with our names on them, and answering machines that work. Why do you think outplacement firms provide office space as part of their service? Says Walter Polsky, CEO of one of them, Cambridge Human Resources in Chicago: "The hardest thing for our clients is not having an office to go to anymore." In the words of psychologist Harry Levinson of the Levinson Institute in Waltham, Massachusetts, going to the office is "a forward pull into society." The office is really a community, and there aren't many of those left.

I don't think I could stand the isolation and sensory deprivation of working by myself. A friend of mine puts it well: "Everytime I work at home I have the feeling they've evacuated Manhattan and forgot to tell me."

I want to be part of the pageant of the office, the civilized parade of people who have gotten up and gotten dressed each morning to present themselves to their colleagues. The new tie, smart suit, the snazzy suspenders, the--um--unusual hair color. Putting ourselves on gives us comfort. It also prepares us to start thinking about the tasks ahead. Marie Chandoha, a managing director at CS First Boston, has 150 people reporting to her in her role as director of global bond and economic research. She always wears suits to work except for casual Fridays in summer when she wears slacks: "Dressing up gets you more into the work." Drama is the part of the pageant that transfixes me. Have you ever gone to a meeting and not felt the crosscurrents? Maybe Jack and Bob, who you thought were such allies, really don't see eye-to-eye after all. Otherwise, why did Jack just torpedo Bob's project? Once in such a meeting I saw a very careless senior person rip apart a younger colleague in front of the boss. Within weeks, that young person was gone, though he later became successful in another organization. Another time, I was working in a small office when all of us were jerked to our feet by a low roar that started at one corner of the floor and rolled across it like thunder. One of our colleagues was undergoing an epileptic seizure. I saw men who were overweight and out of shape move like lightning to provide emergency aid that kept the victim from injuring himself. That's community.

Barbara A. Gutak, head of the management department at the University of Arizona business school, observes that work provides us with the opportunity to understand better why people react the way they do. We learn our social skills from dealing with folks we are going to have to see again, and "we lose a bit of our fundamental humanity by not interacting with people." In the years that James Obermayer worked at home as a marketing consultant, he yearned for the office. "At home you manage yourself," he says. "At the office even a clerk interacts with four or five people a day." So in 1990 he accepted a job as marketing and sales vice president for Inquiry Handling Service in San Fernando, California, even though it involves a roundtrip commute of 116 miles. "People think I'm crazy," he admits, "but I missed that office interaction." Last Christmas one of his co-workers baked him chocolate chip cookies, and "believe me, I didn't get that working for myself."

Part of the interaction is the friendships we make at work. In addition to our paycheck, corporations provide us with much of our social life, particularly if we're toiling 12 hours a day. Where else are we going to find so large a universe of men and women roughly our own age with similar backgrounds, interests, and aspirations at various stages in their lives? Married with young children, divorced with adolescent children, remarried with grandchildren. Of course, we're going to have a lot in common, we're self-selected. When I think of my friends, I re-alize that I have only one holdover from high school, none from college, and one from graduate school. All the others I have made through the various office jobs I've held.

Some of these friends are men. In the past 20 years or so, as women have climbed the managerial ranks, the office has been the spawning ground of unique and valuable friendships between the sexes--as equals. In these days when sexual harassment charges seem to be flying out from under every rock, when men are defensive and women are angry, it's sometimes hard to believe in platonic relationships in the office. But of course they exist. In 1994, Sharon Lobel, associate professor of management at Seattle University, published the results of her survey of 1,709 men and woman chosen because they had participated in the executive education program at a large Midwestern business school. She found that "men liked having female friends because they could talk about things without feeling vulnerable. Women felt having a close male friend helped them learn what they needed in their careers." None of the relationships she looked at resulted in sexual harassment, although some did turn into affairs that co-workers resented; others ran into trouble when co-workers thought mere friends were having an affair.

Lobel also discovered that the men and women in these relationships had higher merit increases and more positive self-evaluations in performance reviews. Says she: "They were perceived by their bosses to work better, and they themselves thought they worked better."

Leola Furman, an associate professor of social work at the University of North Dakota, surveyed faculty members at five universities in 1987 and discovered that teams composed of men and women tended to be more productive than single-sex teams, and that friends of the opposite sex helped each other solve work problems more creatively than same-sex friends. "These are friendly relationships where there is mutual regard and a utility value, as opposed to intense friendships," Furman says. "You don't want intense friendships in the office of the type you'd have with a spouse or significant other." As the beneficiary of unintense male friendships, I can only say that they have educated me about how office life functions, offered me valuable insights into the odd behavior of that capricious species called Boss, and resulted in some nifty expense-account lunches.

While people like me would lose a lot of what makes our jobs enjoyable if we had to work at home, companies may well risk more. As long as telecommuting--the new catch phrase for home-based work--is voluntary, those who choose to do it are generally happy with the flexibility it gives them to manage their lives. As is increasingly recognized, that flexibility does not include eliminating day care. From her survey of 14,000 home workers in 1984, Kathleen Christensen, a professor at City University of New York, concluded: "Being able to work at home requires the same kind of child care as you'd need if you worked outside the home." AT&T cautions its telecommuters: "Don't expect to provide child or elder care while working from home--keep existing arrangements in place."

The problem arises when telecommuting is not so voluntary, when companies discover they can cut their real estate costs or more easily comply with Clean Air Act mandates to reduce the number of employees commuting by car if they clear out a few floors. Warns Christensen: "This is a dangerous trend. Employees aren't self-selecting anymore." As a result, those who are obliged to work at home feel as if they no longer have a place in the organization, because they are losing access to both the informal knowledge you pick up from hanging around the water cooler and the explicit knowledge of seeing how other people solve business problems. "E-mail just doesn't do it," she says. "All of us can think of how we learned things serendipitously. That can't be institutionalized."

The loss of this social glue does not augur well for what little remains of commitment and loyalty to a company. When employees are reacting with their computers instead of with one another, they can become disconnected from Mother Corp. Gary Curtis, vice president in charge of Boston Consulting Group's information technology practice, raises a worrisome possibility: Managers today have levels of loyalty. The first may be to their companies, but the second, and sometimes stronger, one can be to their discipline or profession. When a design engineer, say, for a consumer products company encounters a problem, she could talk to her colleagues in the office--assuming she was there. But she's not there, so thanks to the Internet, she expands her scope of inquiry to engineers who work for other outfits. They get to know her, she gets to know them. "What happens to company loyalty then?" Curtis asks. "We're creating a phenomenon whose results can't be predicted."

Teams, the hottest new management tool, are hard to lead when the members are scattered. Leaders can't go house to house to coach them. And like parents, they are never really sure the kids are doing their homework when they're upstairs.

Personal contact is very important in evaluating employees. "How do I, as a boss, determine what you need to become a leader if I don't see you?" asks Kathleen Reardon, director of the Leadership Institute at USC. These problems were brought home to a large financial services company that decided to encourage telecommuting among the staff in human resources, systems, and the back office. Part of the rationale was that these employees did most of their work over the phone or on a computer anyway.

At first the offer was oversubscribed and the company quickly wired up 50 to 100 workers for a test. But within a few months almost everyone abandoned telecommuting or cut it back to one day a week. Says a consultant involved in the project: "People perceived their loss of face-time at work was not helping their careers. They got this dread feeling: If I'm not there, I'm not there." While the consultant felt the workers made their decision on insufficient data because the project hadn't lasted long enough for personnel evaluations to show if they were being penalized, the company is no longer pushing telecommuting as a significant alternative to the office.

John Rau, the dean of Indiana University's school of business, sees a backlash coming against the whole virtual office trend. "In order to compete," he says, "it's important to understand how you maintain relations over a long time. Technology tempts us to believe that relations are disposable." In other words, we still need each other, and right there down the hall. Skyscraper walls--or those of office parks--do not a prison make, just the opposite.