Ixnay on the Objay

I’d held off the fuckers as long as I could. These days we had to login to work at 7:30 a.m. Mondays through Fridays and not sign off before 4:30.

We supposedly could only work fully remotely three days a week now and were supposed to come into the office twice—or at least once a week—officially being there from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. during “core hours.” I myself hadn’t come in for about three weeks. Or was it four?

My productivity was still off the charts, because I was fast and nimble and very experienced with quite a bit of institutional knowledge, so there was no question about that. But my supervisor had recently warned me, “You don’t want to make the powers that be angry at you, Mark.”

“Because they are idiots?“ I wanted to ask, but I held my tongue and just nodded.

I only had seven months left to work before I retired, so I really didn’t want to piss off the execs at this point, but I also wasn’t interested in conforming to their ridiculous plans without protest.

So I did a lot of nodding these days and just did my work as quickly and as well as I could. I figured this would get them to cut me some slack, and then I could ease off into retirement, move to a place with a hammock by a lake in Florida, and leave behind working for the Man for at least a number of months, or a few years if I was lucky. Good riddance.

But that morning I got a call from the COO. I didn’t even really know what the Chief Operating Officer did in a business like ours. And, frankly, I didn’t really care.

It was 10:01 a.m. when his chat popped up on my laptop and the phone icon appeared and began ringing. I swallowed the spoonful of muesli and yogurt I’d been eating, took a sip of tea, and wiped my face with a paper towel. Then I clicked on the green answer icon.

His video came on, so I smoothed back my messy hair as best I could and clicked my video on as well.

“Mark,” he started off, “we need to resolve your absentee issues stat.”

“Well, good morning to you too, Don.”

“Yes, good morning. Now, getting back to the matter at hand, we’ve been informed that you have NOT been following our new Remote Work Policy. And that is a CONCERN.”

I could hear the capitalizations in his voice.

“And?” I asked.

“And we require that you, and all employees, start adhering to the new Policy.”

“By adhering, do you mean to say that you want me to stick to this policy like it’s some necessary glue-like substance, even though it—point in fact—would interfere with my productivity?”

“Your productivity is not an issue.”

“No,” I said, “It is not. It’s something you have been making a profit from for years, I believe, while paying me as low a salary as you can.”

“Be that as it may. We need you to start coming into the office two days a week.”

“Why?” I asked.

“We know that collaboration and culture needs to be fostered and maintained. That can’t be done when everyone is working remotely.”

“So you say.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“The last time I came into the office, everyone just stayed in their offices and working remotely from their laptops there. That’s not in-person collaboration. That’s not culture. That’s just working remotely *in* separate offices far less efficiently.”

“Well, I beg to disagree. We all need to start doing this again because this is the new direction our business is going in.”

I knew that I worked at a place that uses top-down management, where employees were in the role of children and managers were the parents. And I knew that nothing I could say would dissuade this utter dillhole.

So I said, “OK.”

He seemed to be shocked at such a quick victory. “You’ll start coming in?”

“I’ll start next week. Oh, wait, next week is my birthday and I’ve already scheduled a few days off. So the week after is when I’ll start.”

“That’s acceptable,” he said. “Thank you.”

“No, Don, thank you. Have a good one.”

He kind of harumphed before we ended the call. I knew that the week after my birthday was the week of July 4th, where we all had two days off, so I could easily parlay that into yet another week of only working remotely.

So that was another three good weeks of remote working while I didn’t have return to the office to follow their ludicrous new policy. Since I was now in the calendar mode of a short timer, scratching off one day at a time, I counted that as a win.

One day at a time. That’s how it really works anyway, always only in the ever present now.