Because I work from home, I need to be in the house at 10:00 am tomorrow, a Saturday, so I can sign for the delivery of new equipment sent to me by the main office-- a laptop, a monitor, a usb port, a keyboard and mouse. Making sure it doesn't get absconded with from my front porch is the least I can do, I suppose. In return I have to send back my old laptop. I've been using it for the past 6 years, and wouldn't you know I finally stopped hating it, but because I dragged my heels on the transition to the new equipment, I have to say a very hasty good bye to the old. I'm sending it back, hoping everything i needed to keep from it is on the new machine and nothing I needed to vanish forever has been overlooked.
Being required to be home for the delivery of work equipment on a Saturday is one of the many ways in which the remote office lifestyle has blurred the line between home and work. When I was commuting everyday, though I always tended to work long hours, before "work-life balance" became one of those suspiciously ubiquitous buzzphrases of corporate speak*, I never mixed work and home life. Once at the office, I was at the office, and at the end of the day, I never had any trouble turning off the work mind when the door shut behind me as I hit the street for home of weekday evenings. Now that I'm remote, there is scarcely any separation between work mind and home mind. Hardly a day goes by when something needed for home life isn't hindered by something needed for work or vice versa. Yesterday, I needed to find time to meet via Zoom with the COO to provide some assistance before taking my dog to the vet. I couldn't very well leave the house unshowered, so I needed to sacrifice time that could have been spent on another project approaching a deadline in order to perform my ablutions. I've been home by myself for the past couple of weeks as the wife and daughter have been on an excursion and we hadn't talked in a few days, but I had to wait until after a weekly meeting to return a call from them.
I'm young at heart (which is a kind way of saying stunted). There aren't a lot of things I feel too old for but work is one of them. Unfortunately I'm too young to retire and underwater enough that I can't stop working but beyond the age where I could look for work I really want to do; but working from home at what I suspect will be my last employment has stretched the boundaries of my tolerance. Trapped is an awfully harsh word, but it has a ring in this instance. This working remotely business is too appealing for a hermit to pass up, and I understand that it's a privilege not everyone can take advantage of, but there is a side of me that can't help but feel there is something really wrong with not having a door, a commute and another door between home life and work life. Having been given the option, I couldn't refuse. But part of me feels it might have been wrong, exploitative even, to have been given the option to conduct the firm's business within the walls of my home.
For instance, units of time by which to measure one's exploitation are blurred. Time once spent commuting is now spent working, adding hours to the day. The transition from work day to home life is too subtle not to miss some days. With the end of daylight savings' time, there isn't even a slice of daylight between them.
In order not to use up Paid Time Off I worked through COVID last year, taking not one day off. It was my choice to do, but along with my head and chest, the clarity of what to do was clogged by the advantage that I could take of working from home.
Worst of all: there's no such thing as a snow day anymore.
Isolation from colleagues means that solidarity with co-workers happens on the company's terms. To compensate for any tendencies of the workforce to drift from cohesion with the mission of the firm, puerile team building activities are introduced. In the absence of other people's reactions to these efforts against which to gauge my own I can only judge them for myself. I was never a fan but they seem lamer now. Even hostile. Many of the activities center around diversity and inclusion and ways that I can be a better ally and in general feel bad about myself rather than about the inequality of the system and about the ways in which diversity overindulgence can keep us separate from each other. They think I think they're being good but they don't realize I've read Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's Elite Capture and Catherine Liu's Virtue Hoarders.
Among the benefits trumpeted by the firm are an array of services offered as a way of ensuring my mental health. Grief training, individual counseling including text-based consults on demand, seminars on presence and gratitude. It isn't like I'm not in greater need of mental health, and no question the increasing inability to extract myself from my job is largely responsible for it. Perhaps I could at least be grateful to see some evidence of culpability on their part in the procurement of tools for addressing the insanity. Yet something about the firm's benignly insisting insinuation into my "headspace" as some of their memos call it, puts me in mind of an unforgettably acute observation I came across in Micha Frazer-Carroll's Mad World. She was writing about the ways in which society at large places responsibility for the causes, treatments and repercussions of mental illness on those whom its madness-making ways make mad. But I find myself applying it here in spite of myself:
The transformation of complex social experience into diagnostic language may mute our political realities. In the same vein, it can serve as a smokescreen for various forms of violence. When people die by suicide while waiting for benefits or for trans healthcare, suicide may be read as a result of illness that originated from inside the person’s mind. The state’s responsibility for social murder is therefore diminished. This process of medicalisation also leads the living towards overwhelmingly medical ‘solutions’ for distress; we are prescribed drugs or cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) instead of revolution.
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* The neoliberal corporation's ostentatious interest in its employees' work-life balance is a way for it to concern troll about the quality of the portion of a worker's time spent at home so that it can claim the balance.
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