My management has their knickers in a knot about us being physically present in the office. I know this is a small thing to complain about when so many people don’t have jobs, but this asinine request is sitting in my craw.
For five years, I worked for a large corporation from my office at home. No carbon fuels used to get there, no contribution to highway jams; I didn’t risk my life riding alongside people who were putting on makeup or texting whilst wielding around their 2-3 ton vehicles at break neck speeds. And if I needed to talk to my ob/gyn every few months, I didn’t have to whisper or give my colleagues way more information than they care to have about my menstrual cycles.
Now, that company did not put this work-from-home policy in place just to please the likes of me. And frankly, I’m sure decreasing the company’s carbon footprint was not their prime directive either, although they did find a way to work it into their PR quite often. No, kids, they did this because it was CHEAP: they realized that real estate in Cupertino and New York and Singapore is expensive.
While I’m sure the company bigwigs wouldn’t care, this policy made people stick around. Not exactly loyalty, more a matter of convenience--the philosophy enabled a great work/life balance for us working slugs. We could have dinner with our families at reasonable hours, we could take an hour off to pick up our kids from school and log back in when they’d gone to sleep, we could in other words, have a life and have a job.
Enter current company: my management says that working from home is not in their plan. They want butts in seats. They frequently walk the aisles to do what we affectionately [sic] refer to as “bed checks.” They have, in my most humble opinion, this juvenile view that unless we worker bees are visibly working away at our desks, we’re goofing off. You know, us kids, we just can’t be trusted. I say, you trust people, they respond in kind. You treat them like children, well, you get what you ask for.
So I trudge in, trying not to rub bumpers with any of the idiots who are texting their friends about the traffic or reading the newspaper, just to get on the phone and talk to the people I work with in Australia, London, and Massachusetts. Or worse, I plop down at my teeny tiny desk in my itsy bitsy cubicle in the huge warehouse that I work in, just to hear my coworkers talk into their phones to their colleagues in Milan, Chicago, and Texas. It’s maddening. I can’t think. Sometimes I got off to what’s privacy booth, which is an airless enclosed room with a phone and an Ethernet drop. Kind of like a jail cell only not as nice.
In my old job, I was known for the work I did. I was promoted twice in five years because I got things done, had good relationships with people, and was generally known as the fabulous person you’ve come to know and love. Not because of how long I sat at my desk.
What do you think?
