There is an insidious thing going on right now. It has slowly in-permeated itself into the daily lives of workers all over the world and has unfortunately become the (air quotes here) the new normal.

What is this thing you say? What is this scary thing you mention? Work.

Before covid-19, or BC-19, the days that we will affectionately look at as the normal times, there was a work expectation. A way that people were expected to be that everyone in the world considered a normal working person. You got up at a certain time in the morning. You got in your car. You drove to some location to punch a clock and/or be seen by others that considered you as a “working person”.

I have been on both sides of the scale. I have punched a clock. I have also held a position for at least the past 15 years or so where I could work-from-home (WFH) for at least one or more days a week if I chose to. I used to be ashamed to tell people that I could work from home occasionally. Even family members and people that knew me personally would meet me with the “eye roll” when I said I was working from home. Work from home? Ha!

Even at work, your coworkers would sort of snicker when someone said they were working from home on certain days.

That is because the perception is that it wasn’t “real work”. You were at home, laying in your bed, watching T.V., and enjoying all of the amenities of home and getting paid a salary for doing basically, nothing. That is the perception.

Reality check.

First, let me tell you my pre-Covid work routine.

I drove in to work. I would arrive around 7am. 7:30am at the latest. I would turn on my workstation in my office. Then I would walk to the break room to get a cup of coffee. I would be accompanied by 3 or 4 other coworkers that were “early birds” like myself. We would talk about work issues on the way to the break room and on the way back with our coffee. It was fun face-time. Many technical issues have been solved during these coffee sessions. We would do this 4 or 5 times a day.

At 4:30pm to 5pm (if there were no pressing fires to put out), we would shutdown our workstations and call it a day. Drive home. Repeat the next day.

Some would still call that a long work day. 9 to 9 1/2 hours daily.

During Covid.

I wake up around 4:30 to 5am. I have a morning routine of things I do that include reading my bible and praising GOD. I log onto my computer no later than 6:30am. Every day.

I work and attempt to get off around 4pm – 5pm.

It doesn’t always work that way. Because you work from home people have no respect of your time. They figure, “well, you are at home and you are not doing anything…” so they will call you without warning or courtesy email and expect you to answer immediately. They schedule meetings during normal office lunch times because “well, you are home and you are not doing anything…”

You bosses will speak with a forked tongue. They will tell you to take time, relax, set boundaries, but they are sometimes the main offenders. During Covid, my office was closed and they shut the phone lines down. Now my personal cell phone became my “primary work phone line”. No stipend. No offset of cost. No boundaries. I get phone calls at night from people in other time zones looking for support. “Uh, I am off right now…” and be met with “well, since I have you…”

I get emails and follow-ups at night and sometimes will work well into the night, sometimes after midnight just to keep up.

My work load has quadruped. I have been told “Do not work beyond 8 hours a day…” and “Keep a work-life balance…” while at the same time dropping additional work and deadlines upon me.

The reality is that many companies and industries have made out like bandits due to the increased profitability they have experienced during covid and the work-from-home workforce.

I think a dirty little secret is that the push to bring workers back into the office is not due to need, but rather companies that have paid multi-million dollar leases on office space and buildings, maintenance and fees, for a pre-covid workforce that is no longer there. They are contractually bound to money that they cannot get back or break out of so they have to justify the existence by having someone occupy these ghost-spaces.

This has become the “new normal”. I am curious to see where this is going. Maybe we are seeing something akin to when secretaries because extinct for the most part due to the personal computer.

Who is old enough to remember when most companies had a secretarial pool. Some building had 3 or 4 floors of nothing but secretaries that typed letters and took dictation to transcribe into correspondence. How many parents tell their daughters to become a secretary because “you will always have a job”?