“Working from home” bothers me – OK, before you hate on me, as there are a few benefits to this trend, like reducing traffic on the roads, etc., here are a few reasons “working from home” really gets under my skin. Can I be the only one that feels the same way?

1. Fucking Zoom Calls on speakerphone – I mean where do I start? For anyone in the same space that is subjected to listening to the incomprehensible corporate babble of a roommate, spouse, or significant other’s company conference calls, I silently weep for you. My home used to be a calming and tranquil space where, when home, I could listen to music, walk around singing to myself in my underwear, or actually hear the birds sing outside. Now, from 7am til 6pm on a seemingly daily basis, all I hear in my house are the fingernails on a chalkboard of Bob, or Barbara, Loblaw, corporate exec of the bee watcher watchers and the minions of others making a difference one conference call after another. Ughh, make it stop! Can’t you all just drive, or better yet walk, to an office somewhere and talk this stuff out in private?

2. Division & Alienation – I see this concept of working from home just making people generally less tolerable to other humans. Working from home eliminates any form of a common schedule where people drink tea/coffee or eat lunches together, and learn to get along and work together. With no downtime or opportunity to physically gather, this way of life provides few avenues for people to be face-to-face and complain, work through issues, and talk about things other than work. Just a continuous, isolated existence of talking to faces on a screen in a seemingly endless back-to-back frantic schedule. We are trending towards an existence that is individually so unique, isolated, and comfortable that anything outside the norms of our comfy home and AI-generated, personal social media threads becomes incomprehensible and intolerable.

3. “24-7” – This could be a whole thread in itself, but when there is no physical separation between work and home, well, the concept of being at work or being off-the-clock and home just really doesn’t exist. So, what happens, if you haven’t experienced this phenomenon, is that every one that is in the “working from home” culture (across the globe) just expects you to be available for work any time of the day and night. Is this really a sustainable way of life? I mean even when our ancestors were hunting and gathering, they had time to howl at the moon, essentially slept when it was dark, and had time to do other human-like things such as maybe sing together, bang on a drum, or paint pictures on cave walls. Oh, where did the good ole days go?