Your team is "offline?" As in they're not even telecommuting to begin with i.e., not working from home?

I am confused? This FML needs more detail. It sounds as if your boss wants you to physically communicate with your team instead of over the computer, and in that scenario them being all offline wouldn't really matter. But if your team is not in the office with you or works somewhere else there may be a problem? In this context this FML doesn't make a lot of sense.

Do you mean "off-site?" Hey, someone's got to be in the office to listen to the boss's boring stories and smell his farts.

OP appears to be saying all his team telecommutes, so he asked his boss if he could too and his boss said no because OP needs to maintain an office presence for his team. FML because this response doesn't make sense, and apparently his team is bad at staying online during working hours.

In that case, tell your boss you'll be glad to come into the office on any day one of your team is present.

OP here, this actually got published ... anyway, to clarify, my team tends to telecommute on Fridays (including me) so I asked to ensure I could (as a courtesy). He said no, and only a couple people were in the office. But, I did talk to him and he thought it was Thursday and that the request was therefore odd. He apologized for making me come in to the office and we are all good!

This is exactly the situation with my team. All of them work remotely, but as the team Admin, I am not allowed to have that option. I have to come into the office but I'm literally the only one on my entire team who even HAS an office. It's ridiculous! And it's never going to change - all because some executive in another state has decided that us lowly Admins are shady and can't be trusted to be "left on our own."