I’m pretty sure that’s worse, but I have managed to never see an episode of The Teletubbies, so I could be wrong.
Edit: Fun Fact, the Teletubby Sun Baby is currently expecting her first child. Judging by when she announced to the media, the kid will be here by July
Teletubbies are peak stopgap pedagogy. Lots of scientific backing.
Wait, hear me out. The whole show is set up so that you have repetitions of the same thing said at different levels of language acquisition so small kids can identify with whichever tubbie is at their level, look down a bit on the ones below that, and up to the ones above it (it goes all the way from pretty much baby speech to full adult). Thus their minds can climb the ladder.
Under normal circumstances that kind of setup is present in a child’s environment – differently-aged kids and adults, either in the family or neighbourhood, they get plenty of exposure. Now enter capitalism, alienation and atomisation and small kids get parked in front of the TV which might speak to them at a language level they aren’t at, and can’t react to them either, by translating their baby speech to more adult speech. Along come the Teletubbies, making sure that those kids at least have a resemblance of language skill once they reach school age.
And all that so the US can cut billionaire taxes to avoid paying for universal free daycare. Not that it should be taken off the air, also countries without that fucked of a situation air it because it doesn’t hurt anyone and might help the occasional kid and the rest are merely entertained, but it’s specifically the US combination of atrocious child rearing conditions (can’t even play with other kids because you can’t roam suburbia because that would get the parents arrested), combined with enough university resources to come up with the Teletubbies that, well, created the Teletubbies.
Stop making me old! I can be young as long everyone works together to say 1999 was last year. And we can all believe we’ll be able to start up a tech company to get rich!
I was born in 1980, so that’s fine with me
I have managed to never see an episode of The Teletubbies
I tried once. You haven’t missed much. Or maybe I’m not young and hip enough to get it.
Dance, fucker, dance!
Bajoran workers, your attention please. Your attempt to seize control of this facility is going to fail. You are valuable workers, and we wish you no harm. However, if you do not return control of this unit to your Cardassian supervisors, we will be forced to take action. You have eight minutes to make your decision.
This was the moment that everyone realized that Ellen was a massive piece of shit. Like, Dukat? Have you no shame?
What do you mean? He saved Bajor. Honestly, they should be building statues of him. /s
“Return to the office.”
Uh… There aren’t actually enough facilities here at the office because you downsized after the pandemic.
“Return to the office now.”
Ok, can I get a dedicated seat so I don’t have to adjust my monitor for 10 minutes every time I come in?
“No, there aren’t enough seats for everyone to have one.”
Oh…ok…
My work literally has people in the cafeteria and food courts with their laptops because we don’t have enough seats for everyone.
That will help foster a sense of community and teamwork. Thank you for your attention. Please return to your cafeteria seat.
Sincerely,
Your Manager
It’s funny because I know you don’t work at my company but those are word for word the messages we get constantly as we continue to lose IT people and specialists
PS. We’ve been receiving noise complaints from employees with offices near the cafeteria, outside of lunch hours. Please keep the noise in that area to a minimum out of respect for your peers.
Business Innovation™
We are getting ready to have to RTO next week. Buy every single person on my team was hired after the company went fully remote and only 4 of us out of 14 are near an office to return to. So, we get to drive in rush hour traffic there and back, not have enough seats/monitors and may not get to be near our team members that ARE there. And, regardless, till have to be on Teams calls all day because the majority of our team is is spread out across the country and internationally.
They won’t even have the cafeteria operational yet, no immediate plans to do so either, nor is it big enough to seat everyone. They will have one coffee shop that they have assured us “serves lunch items”, but we’ll have ~1000 people in the building trying to get lunch and i’ve never seen a coffee shop serve more than one or two sandwiches a minute. So… for the ~120 of you that get fed, congrats.
Also, the nice thing is that they pulled back the original 4 day in office requirement to only 2 days. However, the only reason for that is because they realized they literally cannot get everyone in the building at once and it’s not even close. So, I’m not filled with confidence on the logistics of this.
The executive: “yeah yeah, I made 1000 peoples lives more miserable, but at least I get to keep my job.”
Fucking useless…
At my workplace, executives get bonuses for how well they implement RTO. It’s written in their performance agreements. Guess who has all the RTO exemptions?
Our cafeteria is just a big room with chairs. The food court that was next to it has since gone bankrupt during COVID and all the storefronts are empty. It’s a giant Teams call zoo.
That’s where the innovation happens, didn’t you read the memo?
10 minutes is rookie numbers. You gotta unpack the standing desk, under desk treadmill, pink gaming chair, kneeling chair, second and third monitors, clamps, cables, coffee warmer, family photos, keyboard, mouse, tarot cards, incense, bobblehead, giant water jug. Ideally, by the time you finish, it’s about time to start packing it up again.
Damn, I just rotate one vertical and then sort through the USBC until I find the one that actually works.
/me takes notes
You’re right, it’s five minutes now. You can request another 5 minutes from HR for a full tea ceremony.
But there are lots of roles in this office, can I please move to a team in this location, or at least work from this location instead?
“No, return to your assigned office”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon for those curious about the lower part of the image.
A visitor… Mmmm… Indeed. I have slept long enough. The kingdom of Heaven has long since forgotten my name, and I am EAGER to make them remember.
Honestly why else keep wages low and people occupied with busy work? It’s a social control structure. We’re not improving anything substantial.
You think corporations keep people on doing busywork just for social control? They can and will fire every single one of them the second that job is automatable. They want control over their workers, but they’d rather pay for a robot to do it instead if they can. Robots don’t cost them payroll tax.
Or that’s their excuse while they’re simply making life difficult for their opposition.
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That’s the weirdest part, cubicles were known to be a very dystopian office design, now they are considered far better than the new standard.
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I recently switched jobs from a company with a “soft” hybrid work requirement to a fully-remote position with a company that doesn’t enforce any office attendance policy. As a neurodivergent introvert, remote work is a comfortable thing for me, and I’ve got a good setup for it.
I took a trip across the state to be in-office for a couple days of meetings recently, and I was honestly kinda surprised to find that the lack of an office attendance policy had kinda killed the company culture. Even on peak attendance days, the office is maybe 1/4 full, silent as a tomb, and basically without value for collaborative work because the people you need to talk to probably aren’t there. I went home from my trip feeling quite a bit worse about my new job, which was kinda the opposite of what was intended.
I didn’t like being in-office at my old job, exactly, but I did really like my team, and enjoyed the conversations and banter we had. I’m fortunate to be working for a good employer that doesn’t see the need to enforce an in-person work policy, but it’s a little sad to realize that not having that policy means that the office as a place to work together with people is functionally dead.
You are not wrong about the lack of corporate culture. But at the end of the day, is that worth giving up family time, company of your pets, a corner office of your choosing, with access to your own fridge and amenities, being able to receive people at the door at reasonable hours, and not having to commute asinine hours?
Many people will reject that notion.
But here’s the kicker: companies don’t care about your well being. They only care about the bottom line. What incentive do they have to cater to your needs? None, other than the minimum for employee retention.
This idea of “team building” is just smoke and mirrors. An excuse to not have to admit the real reason: adapting away from buts-in-seats as a performance measure is hard.
Don’t get me wrong, either – I’m not at all in favor of mandatory RTO policies, and that team that I loved at my old employer is now scattered to the winds as a result of layoffs and related attrition. The corporate arm of that company had nothing to do with how well my team meshed and worked together (though I will give lots of credit to my immediate boss there – I went to work at that company to work with her specifically, and she was one of the best managers one could ever ask for), and I suspect we’d have all agreed to be in-office together one or two days a week even without the RTO mandate. But it’s been hard to get integrated at this new place of work, and I was looking forward to this trip as a way to start connecting with coworkers, only to find out none of them actually turned up to the office anyway. Without the company making a specific effort to bridge the gap, I think that remote work can become really isolating and reinforce existing cliques and teams to the detriment of those who join up later on.
I really relate to this.
My team has stayed intact throughout covid and perpetually WFH but there’s no camaraderie any more and it feels like most of them really aren’t pulling their weight… (of course it’s hard to tell how busy they really are but I’m not dreaming it, there are some objective measures)
I had a similar experience but a different view than you. My last job had no in person requirements but we had an office for people who chose to go.
I did a couple times a week for a few months, and it was actually pleasant, because I knew the people that were there chose to be there. I would socialize with them knowing that they actively wanted to be in a space with coworkers to socialize.
Normally I’d be hesitant to strike up a conversation with someone from a different team in the office because there’s a decent chance they just want to put their head down and work because they don’t want to be there and would rather be working from home, keeping communications strictly to what’s necessary.
Sometimes I would feel less social for weeks or months and wouldn’t go into the office. It was nice to have the option to do both.
Yeha, now your family are your friends. How awful is that?
I started a new job at this manufacturing plant. New supervisor is threatening everyone at the morning meeting that if you look at your phone for ANY reason he will write you up. See him walk by on his phone smiling not 10 minutes later. 🙄 The little shit walks around like a damn prison guard trying to catch people like they’re in highschool cheating on a test. Then if you’re idle for more than a minute he’ll try to find some bullshit for you to do. He also micromanages things to the point that it hurts production because he has no idea what he’s talking about he just wants people to look like they’re busy.
The engineers that designed the production line are a bunch of dickheads too. They didn’t put enough of a buffer zone between areas and the later part of the line runs slower than the first half. Their solution is to make the workers take widgets off the line by hand and then put them on again if the backend goes down.
My employer sold our office. Ownership seems to like profit more than control.
Why does work now reminds me of psychiatric institutions, jail, residential schools and slavery all at once?
Because the good is all supplied by the same company?
Bentham pilled.
what are the white boxes
Locks.
i see now ty
Haha jk that’s just life in general, not the office - we all live in the digital panopticon
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This is functionally true IMO. There are exceptions to this, like if you need to interact with the public (not over the phone) or equipment, as part of your job. Machine operators, desk service people, etc…
For anyone primarily working with data, it’s not a requirement to be in one place or any place specifically.
For me, I work IT support as a service to other companies. My clients are usually not consistent in terms of where they are and even if they’re geographically similar in location, they’re usually not the busiest clients nor do I ever have a full day of work for any of them to justify me going to their site. The past few jobs I’ve had use remote tools to access client systems, and more than 90% of the time, I don’t need to leave my chair to do my job. I feel like that’s the line. If the vast majority of your job can be done without leaving your chair, then working remotely is not only valid, but should be the default.
There’s nothing special about going to a common place and sitting with your co-workers to do your jobs entirely from your chairs. Their chair isn’t special, and nothing at the office is better or more beneficial to my work when I’m doing it. Sitting at the office doesn’t make me work harder or better than I do at home.
I left my last job at the right time. I have friends still working there and they’ve reported that the hybrid work that was in place for years after COVID, was being retired and management expects that everyone is in office 100% of the time so we can sit in their crappy chairs (and they were crappy), and use their crappy computers (and they were crappy), to do the same work.
My new position doesn’t even have an office. It’s a relatively new company, I think they were founded around the time COVID started, maybe a bit before, I’m not sure, and as far as I know, they’ve never had an office. Everyone is 100% remote 100% of the time (except when doing site visits, which is fairly rare). I like it a lot more than the old job. There’s a long story why I no longer work there which isn’t relevant, but the hybrid policy, and the management’s obvious preference to have people in office, was keeping me one-foot-out-the-door. Other circumstances give me reason to suggest that my friends who still work there should vacate, but again, that’s not related to the hybrid/WFH situation.
IMO, any job where you can do basically all of your work “from a chair” and isn’t regarding some machinery or device that cannot be moved for some reason, should be remote… At least, as an option. I don’t begrudge anyone for wanting to work from an office. I’m not that kind of person and that makes me different from them. We’re different, and that’s ok. Any employer who forces one or the other on people who could work either way, is doing themselves and their employees, a disservice. Good people will go walking if you don’t let them choose. My company doesn’t provide a choice because we don’t have an office to work from; I get it. People who like in office environments need not apply. They’re up front about it. Meanwhile other employers shield themselves behind “hybrid” as a buzzword, and bluntly, do not provide any context on job searches for what that looks like at that company. Is it one day a week in office? Is it one day a week WFH? Is it something in between? Do you get to choose your own adventure with WFH, or is it dictated to you by your employer? What does hybrid even mean anymore? It’s a useless buzzword. So when I saw the listing for my current job which said it was a “fully remote position” I jumped. I’m way better for it.
Other people will want different things. Taking the choice away from them only breeds resentment. That leads to turnover, and the cycle continues. It’s why I wanted to leave my last job, it’s why I am happier in my new job.
