Index

When are they going to learn?

My wife works in a classic office job, even though she has been working from home for over a year. Recently her bosses have been pushing to get everyone back into the office. They haven’t changed the ‘cubicle hell’ layout of the office - it is still too close for social distancing - and they haven’t improved the ventilation, so they have very little fresh air circulation, but they still are saying that people are going to have to be back in it. With the Delta variant going around and all of their offices in ‘red zones,’ they finally backed off and moved the date for return from September to October, but that is still way too close if you pay any attention to the reality and patterns of the plague.

But here is the truly sad part. ‘The office’ as Americans live it is not a place to work. It is a place to try to get work done in spite of itself. The office is a social environment for social people, not a work environment for workers. Every office I have been in in the last twenty years was there so that the bosses could micro-manage the workers and get their egos stroked, a place that allows those same bosses to justify their existences based on how hard they make it for the workers.

This may be slowly changing, but the pace of change is glacial. The #MeToo movement has apparently begun to wind down a least one of the historical perks of being a ‘boss.’ Likewise, revolts by workers in a couple of high tech firms have forced a few bosses to back off on the amoral ‘all profit all the time’ corporate mantra and actually consider at least a little bit of the morality of what they make money off of. That said, the office is still more about the bosses and their egos than it is about the work.

I am especially sensitive to these problems because I am an introvert with adult ADHD, so that makes the problems with trying to get work done obvious - offices are quite the little piece of hell for me to try to get any work done in. The kind of work I did was creative work - engineering and programming are crafts, individual creative work that has almost no social aspect while the work is actually taking place. While ADHD is considered a disability under ADA, companies refuse to understand that what they consider ‘executive perks’ - peaceful, uninterrupted work environments - are necessary for those of us that don’t fit into cubicle hell.

A programmer friend of mine once told me that he can trace every bug he finds in his code to an interruption - the phone ringing, someone stopping by his cubicle, etc. He made me feel half-guilty about going by his cubicle even though we both needed the discussion. Our kind of technical work is a natural fit for introverts. While we may or may not need social time, socializing is not part of our work. As a writer, I have at least managed to take control of my work environment, although for the moment it has destroyed my cash flow.

To top it off, not only is the office a productivity destroyer, the bosses pay tons of money to keep their ‘workers’ prisoners in them and under control. It seems pretty damned obvious that if they took the hundreds of dollars per month that they pay for the square footage for desks and all of the other ‘stuff’ that goes into an office, and put that money into the workers’ paychecks, they would have happier worker bees by a long shot, and more work would get done. The thousands of dollars the mangers put into their own office perks - big offices, expensive desks, etc. - should go it into paying for counseling to help them with their tiny little egos. In the end they would be happier people, and companies would run far more efficiency and be more productive.

Slavery as a model for getting work done was an economic disaster as far back as the War Between the States, and it hasn’t improved as ‘work’ has changed from manual labor to intellectual creation. The trend toward creative output as production is continuing and accelerating as the intellectual content in what we produce grows rapidly while the manual labor content rapidly trends to zero. The economic, social, and even the accounting models that most companies still operate on were defined before the time of the American Revolution, and the current fascist cult that is trying to end democracy as we know it is firmly grounded in the social order of that time, complete with slavery. It is no wonder that they like to claim a connection to that time; it is also incredibly sad and stupid.

“We The People” was a massive overstatement when it was written, a political convenience with minimal roots in reality. The only real difference between the founding fathers and the ruling classes of the time in Europe was that the founders were not birthright royalty, but ‘commoners.’ The rest of the citizenry of the country has been struggling to be included in those words ever since they were written, and have made some small progress. The fascists of the orange cult and their billionaire and corporate backers are trying their damndest to roll back even the tiniest bit of that progress, but reality isn’t cooperating. COVID and global warming are just the latest pieces of a reality that drives us ever forward, and we have to go forward or the planet will soon be a sterile ball with some cockroaches left to work their way up the evolutionary ladder.