Vocal Voices

Our daughter works for a multinational company. Since she took the job she has always worked from home.

Across the world though this seems to be causing a problem. Some employees, also working from home, report that they are lonely, depressed and even suicidal.
The company now has set aside time to combat this, by getting colleagues to chat to one person on line (using zoom or facetime or whatever). Then after five minutes they stop and move to chat to another colleague for five minutes.

Human beings are social animals. We aren't meant to lock ourselves away from other human contact, it's not good for us.

Giving people the chance to remotely speak, one-on-one for, five minutes does not make them any less isolated. They are still in Wall-E world sat at their desks in their jim-jams with no human "contact": just as before.

This "concession" is just a sop by their employers to make it look as though they care.

The only way for WFHers to overcome this is to get out and meet others, mingle and make friends. Those are life skills learned through practice and WFH reduces the opportunities to hone those skills.

Solution? Get a different job.

Well this WFHomer is part mole and loves not having to slog into the office every day. As a lot of his social life is remote anyway and he has no interest in becoming a functional alcoholic by going to the pub and getting blasted regularly, life is just fine with WFH.

Every other month I travel to my apartment, set up and only go out when I have to. Bliss. Relaxation.

Mrs S and I went to the Ice Hotel at Kiruna in Sweden when I first worked there. We went on a snowmobile ride and the guide for the ride was going on about those SAD individuals in Stockholm who needed their light boxes in winter. Dark he said, they've never seen real winter dark, they should come here what a bunch of wimps.

Our society becomes more precious as every decade goes by. What are they going to do when simply asking for someone to work is "too much stress"??

I know, AI and Bots will be there to make sure they don't have to stress themselves.

We will become too fragile to survive.

Shop assistants, fire crews, hotel staff, police, doctors, nurses, street cleaners, brick layers, joiners, carpenters, paramedics, supermarket staff, roofers, electricians, bus drivers, other drivers, pilots, cabin crew, seafarers, agricultural workers, care workers, scientists, takeaway cooks, security staff, prison officers, baristas, refuse collectors, highways technicians, and many, many more, even some in IT jobs, all working from home, eh?

Without them the WFHers would have to get off their arses and do a proper day's work.

We are already too fragile to survive because the snowflakes believe that technology (and other peeps) will do the work for them. Go watch them with their phones...

"Android (Andy) my bum needs a wipe..."

Last Thursday I went and talked to a class of school children telling them what it was like going to school during the war.

I enjoyed it as i spoke to two of the teachers as well as some of the children.
On Saturday,in Chorley, I spoke to a lady who wason a big mpbile scooter. I had never met her before but we chatted for nearly ten ninutes.
I will talk to anybody both young and old. At the check out in the supermarket I say they have got the awkward customer again.

When I asked the electrician about working from home, he said he cannot find a long enough screwdriver!!
Can those WOB put suncream on their expenses? How do they recharge thier laptops? are there charging points in the sand?

Cruiser wrote:When I asked the electrician about working from home, he said he cannot find a long enough screwdriver!!

Border guards, CNC machine operators, garage mechanics, sewage workers, plumbers....

When WFH became a "thing" I was reading many blogs. One constant claim from these people was that they were more productive. Logically that could not be true, yet ir was thrown out without challenge. If people were more productive based on the same workload a couple of things follow. Fewer hours were needed to complete the same work - lower wages - or fewer people were needed. Simple mathematics.

Another truism also emerged for us, the wider public. Access to services such as utilities, banks, the NHS and so on became a nightmare. "Due to a high number of calls we are very busy, please try again later." It became the mantra we all came to know and love.

In many cases WFH is not down to the worker, it is down to the employer.

An employer who is saving £££££ by not having to pay for rented office space, business rates and energy costs for heat and light.

And if you are in an office based profession it may not be a case of get another job, it might be having to make a complete career change; and there are people who are a stage in their lives where they wonder if it is going to be sensible to try that.

My daughter is OK. She is married, she has family, friends and support nearby. There are many people who live alone and who are now working alone as well. They are the ones who aren't so lucky.

Community and social interaction is something which is the responsibility of the person. Even if you WFH, there are evenings and weekends when you can be out and about, you can join clubs or even volunteer for community work and become part of the community.

There are 10,001 things you can do to expand your social circle if you really want to. Even if you WFH. After all people do not work from home 16 hours a day and then sleep for 8. They don't, mostly, WFH on the weekend and all week.

What are they saying? That because they don't get social interaction during the working day, that their binge watching of whatever dross is on TV, keeping them away from other people, is the fault of their employer.

Colour me skeptical.

I have worked in a few places where the "social" interaction of working with my colleagues was worse than sitting in a dark room on my own.

Yesterday I was reading about an experiment where they had tested people with an electric shock and judged whether people would want to be shocked again. Then they put these people in an isolated environment for a whole 15 minutes. The people had a choice of sitting there for 15 minutes with their own thoughts or shocking themselves.

It is amazing the number of people who decided to shock themselves rather than sitting quietly for 15 minutes. One person shocked himself 192 times. I think that says more about the person that the test.

But, honestly. 15 Minutes?!!! I travelled by train from Germany to the UK several times whilst in the Army. I always got stuck at Essen Station. Always for 4 hours and there was Always absolutely Nothing to do and I never had a book. Needless to say the Internet didn't even exist then, let alone mobile phones or e-readers.

Stuck in your own head for 4 hours is "challenging" but I found it quite possible.

Mick loved working from home, and did it very successfully for 15 years In fact one of the reasons he retired early, on a nice redundancy package, was because a new Big Cheese came in, at the very top, and demanded that everyone go back into offices. No way was Mick going to commute over to the other side of Bristol every day Their loss

But, Kaz, Mick had (has) specialist skills in a non commercial and non customer-facing role. It is an almost invisibly small group when compared with those who might be able to work from home and the much larger group in the working population who cannot and never will be able to work from home.

He was also probably trained to do so virtually from the off, unlike those mentioned in the OP.

Apples and pears.

My n-d-n was thrown in at short notice and hates it. He calls it FAAH - I'll leave readers to work out what the acronym means.