Nah, being at work was driving me towards a nervous breakdown. Open office + management that liked to just drop in at my desk uninvited and without a heads up had me an absolute wreck.
I did not handle the panopiticon well.
You could place me next door to the office, and it would have been the same.
That would just require them to admit that, as managers, their jobs are to sit in meetings and delegate work. Currently, most of them don't want to admit that - especially upper management about middle management - but as soon as they needed some kind of quantitative measure to highlight their productivity, it would be normalized and accepted.
I spent the first year of covid working from the couch, and it was more than fine, at least from a work perspective. I was more productive there, I think, than I am in my home office! But it robbed me of my den. I was only able to be productive in that space by it no longer being a relaxation and entertainment space. So, I had to reclaim it.
But still, the idea of working from a comfortable space is something employers see as unprofessional, and a sign you're not actually working. They're wrong, but perception always wins out. And in their minds, that's what we're doing when working from home - being comfortable, relaxing, and not doing any work.
Employers have publicly accused employees of "time theft" over and over again since lockdowns started, and have brought it up in almost every discussion about RTO. They see people working from their living room as this "time theft", even as the amount of work that they get done has remained consistent with, or even higher than, what they got done at the office. Simply by being at home, were theives in their minds. Because they can't be creepy little shits and stand to greet us when we get back from lunch 2 minutes late, or time how long we're in the bathroom.
They said -- out loud, with words, as well as with actions -- that they neither trust nor respect us. Many of them installed tracking software on remote hardware so that they could be alerted if employees took their hands off of their mouses long enough to even think, because if we're not living in their own panopiticons, they think we're all trying to fuck them over.
Which, to me, is the admission that they're actively and consciously trying to fuck us over.
They're not upset today that RTO hampered "productivity", because they don't care about that. They were, and are, willing to pay the price in order to physically lord themselves over people. What they regret is that people quit, and they've struggled to hire, and those that they have interviewed have made demands of them -- like higher wages, or to be able to work remotely.
They regret the feeling that they lost power when attempting to reassert it.
It was fall, 2002. It was the start of my 2nd year of university, and I had just moved into a basement apartment with my new roommates, who I'd known from residence the previous year. It was only my 2nd year living away from home, and I hadn't adjusted to the new region of the country in any way. I was 2000 km from home. My roommates all grew up within a few hundred km of school.
So, when I looked up one afternoon and saw... THAT clinging to the hallway ceiling, I didn't know what to make of it. We have centipedes back home, but they're small, narrow, and live under rocks. Nothing about them suggested that what I was looking at then was related to them (other than that they both had way, way too many legs). So, I was... concerned, but mostly that I'd meet these alien things from this sometimes alien feeling place regularly.
I grabbed some tupperware so that I could capture it and ask my roommates about it, because surely they'd know what it was. But when I brought the plastic container up to meet the ceiling, the thing made off down the hallway like it was trying to win the 100 metre dash. After several attempts at trying to encapsulate the thing, I accidentally squished it between the edge of the container and the ceiling. This was, at least, enough to actually get it out of the house.
On my way to the back door, I passed one of my roommate's rooms, and poked my head in to acquire about the still squirming hellspawn hanging out of the plastic tub, expecting to discover the name of this fell beast, but all he did was back away in disgust, declaring much more loudly than I think he intended that he didn't know.
So, lacking a proper name, we just called them "evil bugs". Thankfully, we only found a few more of them over the next few years.
Hey look, it's one of those "This doesn't affect me, so why should I give a shit?" types! With enough training, they evolve into "Why didn't anyone warn me??!?" types.
And even if he doesn't, a large percentage of MPs do, either because they needed that passive income to actually be able to afford to run for parliament (campaigning is a full time, temporary job, and it's difficult to go a month without an income), or because an MP's salary and position makes it so much easier to afford the rental properties after they've won the election.
And if you can find yourself in the position to set yourself up for life with a passive income, most people are going to take that opportunity. Especially the neo-liberals that dominate all of the viable parties who don't even have a theoretical problem with the idea .
It does, but it's still attached to all of the bullshit in Jira. It's one more thing to look at there, not the thing that's used to manage.