At least it has New Zealand.

Same. 5 full years WFH and honestly work was enjoyable AND I got so much more actual work done.

But we gotta RTO now because uhhhh… Reasons!

I get nothing done anymore and I’m just frustrated all day and all my time is utterly wasted. No time to get work done, no time to get home chores done, constantly exhausted from the pace of running back and forth to meetings and driving all over the place wasting time and gasoline.

So glad I burned a gallon of gasoline into the air and wasted an hour to move my ass from a comfy chair at home on a teams call to a less comfy chair in a different building with a worse desk to join a teams call. Productivity!!!

Don’t you want to find out how we all slept with your mother last night?

My big company just did a full RTO mandate after 5 years full WFH since COVID started. It quickly swung from a good enjoyable job with plenty of work able to be done during all the bullshit meetings to an open office cubicle farm nightmare with harsh bright lights, tons of noise and distractions, and having to physically move from home to office and from desk to meeting room on different floors all the time eating up every last second of available time to do my ACTUAL job. And we are doing a bastardized version of Scrum and it’s miserable.

I got reprimanded one day because in our daily standup I simply said that I had not made any progress on my tasks since yesterday because I was in meetings all day. Apparently that wasn’t being a team player.

Yeah. I don’t know which was better. Having millions of closeted racist hateful people pretending to be nice or outwardly venom spewing racists.

At least now we can tell who the bad guys are because they broadcast it everywhere they go, and we can cut them out of our lives and try to stay away from their toxicity.

Fair. That is one good thing.

It absolutely is a cult of personality. The part that breaks my brain is that his personality is abysmal. Just gross, horrible, mean, rude, hateful, lying, cheating, hurtful. Not even objectively attractive or well spoken. Just babbling hateful drivel. I do not understand how it ever got this big except that he represents all the worst parts of humanity and he gave all the worst people the permission to be the worst version of themselves and that is more appealing than being smart or kind.

And when he does die the cult WILL implode. It already has fractured, but it will shatter into factions and infighting and it will be a big mess and lots of collateral damage. But maybe it will all be finally over. A decade of hearing his bullshit will finally end and maybe his cultists will start to snap out of the trance and be reasonable again.

Is there anything with a positive trend or hopeful outlook lately? My entire 42 years seems like everything is “oh, this used to be better, but it’s getting worse now”

No, not steal the source code. Steal Excel! We sneak in one night and grab it and bring the corporate world to a halt.

No, I mean STEAL it.

Downloading isn’t stealing. Reproducing isn’t stealing. Forking a repo isn’t stealing.

I mean. STEAL IT!

20 years with no change? Damn, I thought the Colorado River flowed faster than that. I’ve been lied to!

I downloaded every EA game ever made and I don’t even want to play any of them. I have the files imprisoned on my computer, forever. Bwahahaha!

That’s exactly my situation too.

Half my team is out of state and still remote.

So now half of us are in the office, walking around, away from our computers and “collaborating” like management wants, to the absolute exclusion of the other half of the team. And we miss messages, we don’t see reminders, we are just AWAY on Teams to them. And our job is literally done 100% on a computer so all that time NOT on a computer is just wasted. And then when we go to a meeting, we have to walk to a room just to join a teams call and yell at the ceiling so the remote people can hear us. It’s the worse of both worlds. Not remote, not all in office, but mixed.

I could understand it if 100% of employees could be in the office. Then we wouldn’t have to waste time joining a teams call in a meeting room. We could just meet and chat. Fine. But this… This is so bad.

OMG right!?

I didn’t even mention it in my main post, but half my team is out of state and exempt from RTO.

So half of us commute into an overcrowded office and walk to a meeting room just to join a damn teams call. I hate being in person without a headset and having to yell at a room microphone and look at a smaller screen than I have at home.

Everything about it is inferior than what we had at home. It is harder to hear, harder to see, harder to communicate, takes longer to commute, longer to have to walk to meetings vs click join.

All the RTO seems like execs playing “everyone else is doing it, don’t want to be left behind” or something.

What’s crazy is, so did mine.

Sold multiple office buildings.

Told us all, WFH is here to stay!

And then they blindsided us with a RTO mandate. And we do not all fit in the buildings. There isn’t enough room by some thousand people and they don’t seem to care.

The part that’s even more insulting is that half my team live so far away (several US states away) they are exempt. So now half of us are forces to commute into a crowded building TO JOIN A TEAMS CALL! Ahhhhhh!

Oh that’s encouraging. Good to know I’m on a sinking ship. I sorta assumed as much already though. The RTO mandates so many companies are doing almost feels like a desperate attempt to stay afloat and relevant, but is actually going to hasten the sinking.

Rise up and take back the means of production!

We should steal The Declaration of Independence Microsoft Excel!

But yeah, execs have no idea what all daily work looks like, but because they siphon 99% of the profits that we creat away from us and no matter how wasteful or unproductive everyone is, enough gets done that they STILL make millions off of us. So they don’t care. We all suffer and get paid JUST enough to not riot, but they make millions and millions just by virtue of being the executive or owner.

I wonder how well a company would actually do if it was fully owned by all workers evenly.

Imagine Microsoft if every employee had the same % share in profits. Wonder what that would look like? I bet middle managers would stop wasting money left and right. I bet pointless projects would stop. Anything you do to make the company more efficient or profitable is celebrated and you actually get a share in that profit.

I also wonder if it would simply fail due to people wanting to coast and not pull their share.

Yeah exactly. You can prep all year long, but sometimes it’s the most silly and unexpected things. Wonder how many full “preppers” had enough TP? 🤣

That’s exactly it.

I prep by stocking rice and beans and water and basic tools and supplies.

MAGA preps by stocking ammo and guns and concrete bunkers.

That is NOT the same.

If shit goes down I’m going to be out there helping my neighbors, not shooting them. WTF MAGA?

Same. I have all those items in a (mostly) constant state of ready to go if shit hits the fan.

It’s more like, I don’t expect a zombie apocalypse or a full warzone in my neighborhood, but if power goes out or water becomes unsafe or goes out, or whatever bullshit happens, I’ve got enough basic items to survive and not have to worry too much.

I have dried beans, rice, water and enough other things to be ok.

COVID showed us some of the insanity that can happen when just toilet paper ran out for a week or two. Imagine if food or electricity were unavailable that long.