Back to the Office? Not on your Nelly!

As I write this, the Omicron infections are rising, and as a new lockdown looks imminent, it is, once again, temporarily, academic, for the foreseeable.

I’m talking about Working From Home, or WFH as it’s often shortened. Ever since the first lockdown, when anyone who could work from home was instructed to do so, and anyone who couldn’t was paid to stay home. Unless of course they were a key worker. A driver, a nurse, a shop assistant, a butcher; anything that the country needed to operate.

At the start of 2020, the world wasn’t ready for Working From Home, psychologically at least. Pragmatically, many millions have been working from home for centuries in their home businesses: cottage industries, freelancers, and the like.

In 2009 we had snow. Lots of snow. Lots of snow in comparison to places that don’t get snow, but just a dusting compared to the snowy alpine countries that deal with several feet of snow on a daily basis. Switzerland doesn’t grind to a halt when there’s a bit of snow, they say, and it’s true, but they’re always expecting snow. In 2009, it snowed, and I remember being in the office as colleagues gathered at the big glass windows and watched everything turn white. Everyone checked the weather news sites, and one by one, reluctantly, declared that they couldn’t risk being stuck, so left work early.

I was one of the more persistent ones. It wasn’t that work needed me. I was an analyst, I provided monthly figures, but I felt this unfathomable pressure, a duty to stay at my post whilst others lost their heads. “What if they needed the First Time Permanent Reinstatement figures three and half weeks early? I really should stay.”

Eventually the Director walked by and saw me stood looking out the window. I don’t remember exactly what he said but it was something along the lines of “What the bloody hell are you still doing here? You’ve an hour’s drive in this you idiot. Sod off home and be safe, and for God’s sake drive carefully!” There may have been more swearing. Actually, there might have been less, I do tend to embellish my anecdotes with every retelling.

But why am I writing this? Much as I like recalling this tale, I do have an actual point. There is a thing, call it a condition, that inflicts our industries and encourages bad practice and drives inefficiency. That condition is Presenteeism. The idea that career progression is best served not by productivity, not by what we do, but by what we are seen to be doing.

Make sure that everyone in the chain of command knows what car you drive and make sure they see it in the car park when they arrive at 7am, and make sure it is still there when they leave, even if it’s 10pm. Have a jacket on the back of your seat so when you’re not there, you can’t be far away. Always make time for the CEO and those around them, but always have something important in your hand, and always be on the way to somewhere. Be aloof, but available if needed. Don’t be afraid to big yourself up and get junior staff to do some of your work. I’m obviously exaggerating here to some extent, but there’s a lot of it going on.

But what does this have to do with the snow? The very next day the whole country woke to a fresh covering of crisp white snow. When it snows overnight you don’t even need to look outside to know it’s snowed. You can hear. Everything outside is muffled, muted, like the volume is turned down.

Outside on the street, neighbours were returning to their homes, unable to leave the village because of the ungritted roads were too steep to climb. I couldn’t go to work even if I wanted to, so it was lucky that the boss called me on my company phone and told me that the roads were treacherous and under no circumstances must I attempt the journey. Brill, but this didn’t mean that I could just go back to bed, or sit by the window with a hot chocolate and watch the sheep huddle in the field across the road. No. I had a company laptop, I had a company phone, and I had access to the virtual desktop. I had access to everything I needed in the office from the comfort of my own home. Except for the best liver and bacon in the world from the staff canteen, I had everything I needed to get the job done.

But there’s a problem. How can anyone park their car where it can be seen by senior management – remotely? How can anyone be seen to be doing anything at all – remotely. How could anyone demonstrate their value to the organisation if they have nothing to show for their time?

This was a problem in 2009 and it was a problem in 2020, but technology has moved on. So as the whole world went in to lockdown, and vast numbers made offices in kitchens, bedrooms, and on sofas, thousands felt the icy finger of accountability on their shoulder. “Work from Home?” They said, “Out of the question. Its impossible. A physical presence is critical. One cannot just send emails from anywhere you know. First you must phone the person that you are about to email and for that both you and your colleague need to be at your desks. Then you must send the email, again, from the desk in the office. Then you must ring the person to check that they have received it. And then the critical part, and this cannot be done remotely. You must visit your colleague, or subordinate, and discuss the content of the email while resting against their desk. None of this can be done from home”.

In lockdown, diaries filled with zoom meetings. Meetings about meetings. There were meetings about meetings. Pre meeting meeting meetings. Post meeting meeting meetings. Meetings to discuss the next meeting. Meetings to discuss discussing the next four pre meeting planning meetings and follow up. If nonsense and absurdity had a bastard child it would still be more sensible than that shower. But what does that matter? Everyone is busy, as they should be.

Well not quite. Productivity is right down during lock down. There are numbers and everything so it must true. Even the Guardian says so, and they’re the most unbiased and sensible newspaper in the world ever. Also, now that lockdown is over, there is a reduced footfall in the city centres, less workers eating overpriced sandwiches and drinking over priced coffee, filling over priced car parks, trains and office space. A terrible knock on effect that we are still yet to grasp the full magnitude.

Except. What about the ones that are rather suited to working from home? The ones that have found that they not only get more work done when they are free of the distraction of others, but they don’t really miss the commute?

There are some who quite enjoy the new way of things. No longer do they set their alarm clock for before sunrise to drop of their children in a breakfast club, for a fee, before enduring a long drive or ride to the office. They quite like that they now saunter to their desk at 9am feeling fresh and well rested.

They like that, instead of sharing a cramped office, at the far side of a long commute, and with others that complain about the smell of cuppa soups, or can’t agree on the temperature, or talk loudly on the phone, or fart discreetly but whiffilly, or pretend they can’t hear them with headphones in, and talk about them behind their back etc, they can just sit down and do their job. Some people happen to really enjoy their job but just aren’t interested in office politics. This peculiar type of worker is often overlooked but they do add value to their organisations.

But why aren’t they worried about their value not being seen by the business? Why aren’t they just as desperate as the others to prove their worth? That difference is another P word, productivity, and unlike Presenteeism, it can be measured, and a value can be assigned. This class of worker isn’t burdened by politics, they simply receive their assigned task and complete it within an arranged timeframe, some times alone, sometimes in collaboration, but always more effectively than when also contending with the commute, or Barry’s smelly lunches.

Of course. Any job that can be done as effectively in a log cabin in the Lake District as it can in the office, could also be done in North Korea for a penny a day. While this is technically correct, outsourcing isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. It was tried in the Nineties with IT, and again in the Naughties with customer service. There are still IT jobs and Customer Service jobs in the UK. Automation is by far the biggest threat to job security, but that’s something else entirely.

Then there are the key workers, those whose jobs cannot be done from home. Some would say it’s not fair on them that others have the luxury of working from home. Sounds stupid but this has been said on forums and newspaper comment sections. Others have said that home workers should have their pay cut because they no longer have to cover the commuting and childcare costs if they won’t return to the office. Imagine the outrage if they were told to spend much of their income on something they didn’t need, or if shop workers and drivers were forced to convert half of the kitchen into an office space they don’t need because it’s not fair on homeworkers if they don’t. But let’s not linger on how ridiculous the argument can get.

The cat is out the bag now, the genie is out the bottle. There is no going back to normal, this is the normal. Big shiny offices, and grubby back offices where the support staff are hidden for that matter, are enormous overheads. Overheads that WFH has now made discretionary. While some businesses have taken the line that their staff will work where they are told, where they can be watched, whether they like it or not, their competitors are telling their staff to work where they perform best and are happiest, and are using the cost savings to improve pay and undercut the unresponsive and reactionary rivals.

The industrial revolution brought mass production and transport that changed the face of the planet. Anyone that didn’t adapt was outpaced by those that did. The digital revolution brought the internet and enabled the infrastructure for homeworking. Like the companies that failed to computerise in the eighties, and retailers that didn’t move online, those that snub their employees preference for WFH will also disappear.

Working from home has given me time with my family I would otherwise spend on the commute. It’s given me longer hours in the evening and more hours of sleep. I’m eating better, sleeping better, drinking less, and not missing out on what matters. And on top of that, I put in a good shift every day and the results are there for all to see.

I’m under no such pressure to return to anywhere, but the voices are out there, calling on us all to do our duty and keep Pret supplied with starving miserable workers looking for a quick bite to eat, and the nurseries filled with miserable infants missing their parents for ten hours a day. Well I say no. Not on your Nelly. And so should everyone else.

10/05/2026 0

Remember Listening to Music?

A Facebook meme. I am spending way too much time on Facebook. How much is too much? Some. Some time is too much many might say. But anyway. A meme cropped up.

The image of an old cassette with its tape all mangled and caught up in the tape head mechanism. Yup. How awful that was.

I remember one Christmas, probably 1988, I received a Walkman type device with headphones, and, among other things, Kylie Minogue’s first album, on cassette. That Christmas night I dutifully went to bed when I was told. With the lights out, and me all snug beneath my duvet, I put on the headphones and pressed play. I didn’t even hear the first song in full. “I should be so luc…”

The tape player mangled my brand new Kylie album. And that wasn’t the first and it wasn’t the last. But what could be done? My room was full of cassettes. I had them for music, I had them for computer games, I even had audio books and a beginner’s course in French.

CDs changed that, but they changed a lot more than the mangling of tape and the bother of rewinding. They brought the repeat function, the skip function, and the program function, and that was no bad thing.

I didn’t give it a moment’s thought at the time. I didn’t have to listen to songs I didn’t like, and I could listen to my favourites on repeat, in superior sound quality, and no risk of damage or even wear.

Then came MP3. It became possible to rip your songs from your CDs and play any song at random. Out of the hundreds of songs I’d collected over the years I only ever listened to a handful.

And then streaming came along and you could listen to any song you liked, whenever. Virtually any song ever recorded was now at your finger tips. I occasionally listen to a song or two, maybe every other month, if I feel like it.

Now, this train of thought keeps me going back to a quote from Star Trek:

We believe that when you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man.
Star Trek: Insurrection; Sojef to Picard

In star trek, a group of people on some distant world had opted not to use their technological prowess because it lessened them, diminished them. I can see how that might work. But I’m not about to start listening to music on cassette again because streaming is too easy. That would be like cooking on an open fire in a wood because a kitchen is too convenient. But isn’t that what camping is?

When I was a teen I caught the bus every day to college. The journey was an hour. In the morning I would listen to Alan Parsons Project’s album Pyramid, on the return journey I would flip the tape and listen to I Robot. Thirty years later, every note in every song connects me immediately to a specific point on the bus route. Conversely, on the rare occasion that retread those ways, I automatically think of the song. Such is the power of the music, and it’s not just the song, it’s the emotions, the fond memories that it evokes. I doubt I’d have that if I’d had an unlimited playlist, or even a skip button. But that’s not all we’ve lost.

It’s not a major thing by any means. I don’t think the youth of today would believe they were missing out on anything. They’ve got their own music, and their own struggles. But this meme came up while I was pondering the nature of bliss. This is a philosophy blog afterall, and I was looking for a way to articulate this theme, that we cannot know bliss unless we know strife.

If a song is just a voice command away, it must surely have less value than a song that is recorded from the radio using a separate audio recorder to radio, speaker to microphone, in a noisy house with annoying siblings. And when the device can destroy your efforts. The song, listening to the song, enjoying the song, is the reward for the effort of simply hearing the song.

It’s a small thing, listening to a song, but it’s also a win. It’s a small win, but it’s an achievement none the less, and the way our brains are wired to give us little chemical rewards, dopamine I believe, when a plan comes together, missing those little wins must surely have some cumulative effect.

I’m not passing judgement on people’s lives, lifestyles, or life choices. We are where we are and what is is what is. A lot of the effort has been removed from our lives and yet we are in the midst of mental health crisis. I think there is a connection and that the struggle was confined to audio tape.

Thanks to Facebook I am exposed to a lot of unhappy people posting about poverty and misery, and sharing memes of their hopes that a communist revolution will resolve all of their problems. They haven’t thought it through. But I also know that there is genuine hardship out there, and that not everyone has an easy ride.

But take food as an example. If you want a pizza you can buy a basic one for 99p from the store. Or you can buy a premium one with stuff crust and generous toppings for £5. Or you can pay about £8 and have one freshly made for you and brought to your home with just a few commands on a smart phone app. I would argue though, that takeaway pizza for £8, though it might have better toppings and higher quality ingredients, it doesn’t have the value of the 99p pizza to the person with only £1.02p in their pocket that has a mile to walk to the store and a mile to walk back, and barely has the funds to cook it. Value comes from the struggle, and the struggle brings reward.

But back to the pizza. You want pizza, you can have pizza, very conveniently and tasty too. Then you have the extra time available because the pizza takes no more effort than sliding into a hot oven and sliding out when it’s done. There’s even a machine to wash the plate for you. Effortless and unrewarding.

Imagine that pizza if there was no supermarket and there was no takeaway. Just a butcher, a green grocer, and general store to buy flour and yeast, meat and veg, and oil, and spices, and if those shops were separated by some notable walking distance, and some produce were in short supply. One might be tempted to not bother with pizza at all, too much effort, have a sandwich instead. The pizza has become unobtainable to some extent and it’s value has increased. It has ceased to be the easy option, it is no longer junk food, it has become an endeavour.

Endeavours involve struggle that leads to reward. This is a tough problem though, and it affects all of us, unless we have a calling to pursue. You might think that making the pizza from scratch might resolve the issue, and although making a pizza from scratch might taste nicer than the store bought variety, the reward isn’t there because the struggle isn’t real. You choose to make pizza the hard way, with readily available ingredients from the supermarket. There might be some reward the first time you make it, that’s the learning reward, but it’s not a struggle, it’s a choice, an indulgence.

More and more of our life is being prepackaged for our convenience. More and more of our jobs are becoming automated. About ten years ago, maybe more, probably more to be honest, I wrote a short story about a shop that had no staff and no check out. You just walked in, took what you needed, and walked out. The shop would know who you are, what you took, and charge your account for it. Those shops exist now. I thought it was a moment of genius foresight and never expected them to become a reality in my lifetime, I never suspected that they were already in development as I wrote my story.

Where does this leave us, as a people? The meaningful work done for us. What then? It’s been suggested that we’ll all need some kind of basic income, but what do we do with that? When our most basic needs are met and our whims catered to. What then?

Maybe Star Trek has the answers.

Star Trek is that bizarre utopian future where everything is taken care of, but they’re on a star ship exploring the universe, so not the same as our situation. I think if I was on a star ship I too wouldn’t be bothered by the coloured food cubes, they’re in space, meeting aliens. There are exceptions though. Commander Riker sees the failings of the replicated food and he tries to cook eggs, but he’s not very good at it.

This is all a long winded way of saying something isn’t right. The youth of today won’t know our struggles, but they have their own. The world is changing. We’re on the cusp of super conductors, cold fusion, quantum computers, abiogenesis, and who knows what else. The world is changing so quickly, but if we don’t find some way to restore purpose to everyone’s life, the struggle of a mangled tape will be a luxury beyond the imaginations of our future generations.

25/01/2023 0

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