if i thought you were listening, i'd never say a word

Thursday, 20 August 2020

Why Some of Us Are Not Going Back To The Office

If I hear one more TV pundit, You Tube talking head, or blame-dodging politician say that I need to get back to work or get back to the office, I will know that they are actually ignorant twerps.

I have never stopped working. I've been at my laptop and work mobile since being sent home in March.

One reason I'm working at home is...

...the office is locked. I couldn't go back if I wanted to. Ask the Board Member for HR and Property (now that's what I call a conflicting remit) why he's hibernated the building. He keeps talking about new ways or working, which is code for we're going to unload half our estate of office space.

Another reasons I'm not going back to my old office because it's a ****-hole.

For those of you who don't work for FTSE 100 companies, which includes journalists and politicians...

Most large-company offices are open-plan. Always have been in my working life. The department heads had offices of their own, and of course the boss had the corner office, which had two windows. Now the boss is out in the open office along with the rest of us. If (s)he is there at all: most bosses are somewhere else in meetings or networking. In a large company with a national presence, the boss might be in another office in another town. In the old-style open plan offices, every employee had a seat, and maybe even a pedestal draw. Then the cost-cutters moved in.

The latest iteration of open-plan is best described as no-fixed-abode, so that you have no desk of your own. A lot of them assume that a proportion of the people based there will be on holiday, in another office, in a meeting room, working from home or off sick, and so have fewer seats than people. It's called the over-crowding ratio and the office I'm based in has an over-crowding ration of 1.6. It has a handful of small meeting rooms, and a couple of larger ones. Don't even think of having letters or parcels sent to you at such an office, since there is no internal mail and they don't like Amazon deliveries for the staff.

Because almost any working group has people scattered all over the country, everyone in the office spends a lot of time on the phone, and these days, on Microsoft Teams. It was easier to e-mail the person sitting next to you than find a moment they were free to talk to. The noise levels were high, except when some complete stranger sat amongst us to make phone calls, when we all shut up in case they were a stooge. The air-conditioning was barely sufficient, the place smelled of food between about 11:30 and 14:00, I and my neighbour could do an elbow-bump without moving our chairs, and if I pushed my chair back too vigorously, I would hit the chair behind me. Every other person had £259 Bose QC35's over their ears, which is not a good thing. It says the people around you are pointlessly noisy and are wrecking your concentration. The only thing we did in that office was use the telephones, the internet and the heating, in winter. That aside, there was no reason to go in.

In summary: modern offices suck. Big time.

Don't even talk about the commute.

I would gain nothing by going back, lose a lot of money, and lose a chunk of my quality of life.

Even if that was all not true, I still could not go to work in the office. Because the management have closed it in response to rulings handed down by the Government. Because, you know, reasons.

Monday, 17 August 2020

Photographs I'm Printing (19)

(iPhone SE)

Thursday, 13 August 2020

Covidiots Both: Bonkers Boris and Crazy Chris Whitty

Here I sat recently on one of the hottest nights of this or any other year, and my real problem is a horribly itchy insect bite just below my right ankle. I want to scratch the hell of it, but of course I shouldn't.

(Leaves room)

OK. I just showered it with cold water for about six tracks of Heinrich Biber's Joyful Mysteries. It feels better. When it itches again, I will put my foot in a bowl of cold water.

Covidiocy is like that itch. It won't stop, it distracts me from doing anything else, and if I give way to it, I will wind up worse than before.

How exactly am I affected by Covidiocy?

Out of politeness, I have to wear a bandana when I go shopping or travel on public transport. Ear loops are not stylish and no amount of floral pattern on the mask can distract from that. Those blue not-really-surgical-scraps of plastic and paper are terminally ghastly.

My office has been locked, so I have to work at home, but that means I save a bunch of money not commuting or paying for over-priced sandwiches. The quality of my life improves in so many ways. However, if I pay attendance to my laptop for eight hours plus lunch, I can get to the end of the week and not have done things that would have benefited my life. Just as if I was working in the office. So I've decided to give myself an hour in the morning to do stuff that requires going out: like getting the nearside front wheel trim on my car replaced because it was broken and potentially dangerous. Doing that makes me feel like work is not getting in the way of my life.

(While it's not my choice to work from home, it's my home and work is intruding. When I get a choice, I will or won't set up a dedicated work space and adjust my attitude accordingly.)

So what's the problem?

The problem is that I'm locked in the world with a crazy person. A crazy person who is on record as setting out, in March 2020, to create an atmosphere of fear so that we would stay home. Who chose to call it a `lockdown', which is a term that comes from prison management, so we would think we were prisoners. Who still wants us to stay two metres away from each other and wear masks because we are all diseased. A crazy person who can lock us into our streets and houses on a whim. Who makes up inconsistent rules about what is and is not acceptable behaviour.

For the Regular People, it's like playing a game of Simon Says. They don't need the world to make sense, it's all part of the rich tapestry of life. If you can't take a joke, they will tell you, you shouldn't have joined.

But I'm an alcoholic from a dysfunctional family, so I can't handle crazy people, and I definitely can't handle gaslighters. I can't be around denial and lies. That's why this is affecting me.