This Twitter exchange really happened.
Suddenly, today, I panicked about life inching back toward “normal.”
I don’t want to travel endlessly for work. I don’t want my weekends to be over-committed with activities. I don’t want to miss bedtime with my kid. I don’t want to wear blazers — or, hell, even shoes.
— Emily Ramshaw (@eramshaw) March 6, 2021
this is exactly where @JamieStelter is right now, and i think it helps to hear other people say it too
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) March 6, 2021
I feel this in every way. I finally cleaned out my closet of heels the other day and put my beloved slipper collection in their place. Then, I cried tears of joy.
— Mindy Finn (@mindyfinn) March 6, 2021
The thought of going back to my old routine horrifies me https://t.co/gwxwaH4rIG
— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) March 6, 2021
Wearing shoes is highly overrated.
Perhaps there will be a new normal? We’ve learned we can stay home and still work. Hopefully there’ll be more opportunities for this in the future.
Thinking about all the folks who spend hours in the car commuting everyday. Life is too short.
— Khashoggi’s Ghost (@UROCKlive1) March 6, 2021
If any good comes out of this pandemic it is that those of us in the U.S. have got to use it as a reset button. We can not just go back to the way it was.
(And by gum I will laugh at the first person who attempts to shake my hand for starters)— Sean P. Aune (@seanpaune) March 6, 2021
Yes to this. A thousand times yes. https://t.co/dVLvRA9wOl
— Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen) March 6, 2021
Many people have become accustomed to working from home, conferencing on Zoom, enjoying family time & more
Most will experience reluctance,dread angst when we return our office,crowded trains, being cooped in an office, so it will be interesting to see how we adapt to new normal— Bruno Hugo (@BHPIII13) March 6, 2021
I never want to wear hard pants again. My daily outfit now is pajama sets that have tops that look like I’m dressed for work in my Zoom calls. It’s surprisingly easy and so comfortable. That and slippers is all I want to wear for the rest of my life.
— Ashley McDonald (@CelticWarriorNY) March 6, 2021
This only works for a small group of extremely white-collar careers where good internet access is all a person needs to do their job.
The problem is, all the negatives it pushed onto others.
Every one of these people was had too much anxiety to go out and ordered in everything shifted their risk onto the delivery service industry.
Every one of these people who decided only to order food online destroyed the independent restaurant industry that did not already have online menus and deals with GrubHub or others.
These people benefitted from COVID being the single greatest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich since the end of feudalism. COVID un-democratized our economy in ways we can hardly begin to understand.
These people want to wear sweat pants and slippers for the rest of their lives and so helped push a system that puts all the risk on the lowest paid and most overworked of people.
“I want to wear comfy socks all day so I’ll have my servants do everything for me from now on.”
If you want to know why they are continuing to push doom and gloom even in the face of mass vaccination, this is why. They have the money to afford a vast servant class that keeps from having to do the things they don’t want to do and they want to keep that system in place for as long as possible.
Laugh at me for offering my open hand to you, and I will present a closed one. Repeatedly. And I promise you will not like it.
So those companies have realized that their employees don’t need to be in expensive offices in order to do their jobs. They can work from anywhere.
How long will it take those companies to realize that those jobs can be done more cheaply in India or the Philippines?
Companies have been thinking that for a long time. I work in high tech; “low cost” locations are all the rage. But a number of these companies are beginning to realize that using cheap engineers means using low productivity engineers, and if you look at $ per unit of productivity rather than $ per hour, those “low cost” locations in fact are not particularly low cost at all.
Is Boeing and the 737 max part of that?
Because I have NEVER thought to myself, ” Golly, I sure hope the engineering for this aircraft I’m on was the lowest bid!”
RE: “…a vast servant class…” I just read A Distant Mirror, Tuchman’s history of the 14th century. The parts about the peasant revolts are very instructive. Really, the whole book.
It’s an excellent book, and I’ll second the recommendation.
Interesting that all but two of those tweets were from women.
As a retired, mobility limited person living in a northern state, I must admit that I use delivery services quite a bit and am grateful to those that make my self-imposed hibernation possible.
All that said, if work from home via zoom meetings becomes the “new normal” who is going to maintain and build the server farms, power stations, and vehicle fleets needed to sustain this delivery economy? Especially, when China Joe wakes up and, cancels the jobs of thousands of oil field and pipeline workers.
I have nothing against those services.
But when millions of able bodied people decide that staying home should be the new normal forced on others – e.g., pushing for lockdowns – because it allows them to take advantage of a gig economy service class, that’s wrong.
Then again, a modern aristocracy with themselves as the Second Estate, and the Media/ Academia Complex as the First is kind of the goal.
Loosers and empty skin sacks
I have nothing against home office (for others – my job requires me to be on site) but people should be aware that if they want to be faceless drones they will get treated as faceless drones and maybe paid as such.
And as others said: Home office is mostly really an alternative for office workers, pencil pushers and should not be used to force a way of dealing with things on the whole workforce.
We loved the late spring to late fall months, where we were biking all over the place because work from home was now mandated. The pain in the ass part was, we wanted to bike to places to have lunch… and we couldn’t! Thankfully we quickly figured out a way to bring blankets and towels, and had many a picnic lunch and dinner various places. The one local Panera became a frequent visit, to the point that the staff recognized our names on our orders, and would even bring out our food to us where we would set up under a tree.