My specific gripe is the insistence on everyone coming to the office every day. Never mind that we successfully worked from home and got everything done for the first fifteen months of the pandemic. Never mind that a lot of people want to work from home or at least have a generous hybrid model.
No, none of that matters. Force them to commute, spewing CO2 into the atmosphere. Force them into the office when they don't want to be there. The executives want everything to go back to the way things were before COVID.
I know I'm not alone in this desire to work from home and that other companies besides mine are freaking insistent on making employees work in the office whether there's a reason for them to be there or not. It's frustrating nonetheless.
I don't know if there's a complete lack of trust by the executives or if they think that if they force us into the office long enough we'll think: Oh, yeah, I love commuting in to sit in a cheap, uncomfortable desk chair and be surrounded by noise and chaos because of the ridiculous open office concept.
Dudes (and almost all them are dudes), this is NOT happening. When I work in the office, I'm so exhausted by the time I get home, I can't do anything. When I work from home, I have energy. I have time to do things and time to write.
That's the big one. When I work from home I can write in the evenings. When I work in the office, I'm so zombified by the time I get home that I just stare at a screen--either the TV or the phone.
For the past month, we were able to work from home again and it was all that was awesome in the world. Literally the best month of my working career. The fifteen months previously where I got to work from home was pretty damn good, too, but anxiety about COVID hung over most of that time. But now that I'm fully vaccinated with the booster, I don't have the same level of fear. Concern, yes. I still have that.
I want to work from home forever. But we're forced in anyway. It doesn't matter what we want. The old normal is dead, dudes. Get over it and embrace the new normal.
