Can't work with them. Can't work without them.

Writing is a solitary activity, even for wannabe writers like me, and more often than not it is done when working from home.  Well, yes, there are stories of how writers would check into hotels and furiously pound on the typewriter keys.  Right, Jack?

Working from home has never been the norm for most, but WFH has become the default for most white-collar occupations.  With a coronavirus vaccine months away, companies like Google are making it clear to their employees that it might be summer 2021 before they can regroup in office buildings, and play ping pong like in the good old days.

Does WFH help with productivity?

Measuring productivity in the service sector has always been problematic.  What exactly are the outputs that we can measure and compare when the output is not always tangible, unlike in manufacturing or agriculture?

Yet, "they" said that WFH since the Covid-19 lockdown had increased productivity.  But then the reality is slowly sinking in that WFH is creating more problems for productivity.  The US, which unlike the European countries, is strangled by its irresponsible leader in the White House and several gubernatorial offices, is doomed to experience a productivity drop with continued WFH.

And then there is the employee morale itself.  For people whose living spaces are not really work environments, work-life divide has become hopelessly blurred.

“I used to think of a desk as like a kind of prison cell, where I was chained for eight hours a day,” she tells me over the phone. “It was always like serving time. But, at this point, my desk would be my saviour.”

As long as there was a work to go to, people complained about it while counting down the days towards their next vacation.  It was also a place to go to in order to get away for a few hours from the nagging spouse and whiny children.

Now, there is nowhere to go even if one takes off from work--you are stuck at home, which is where you also work.  Meanwhile, the nagging spouse and the demanding kids are always around all the time.

Those without spouses and children are trapped in loneliness.

More than half a million people have tuned into The Sound of Colleagues, a web page and Spotify playlist of workplace sounds, including keyboards, printers, chatter and coffee machines. Red Pipe, a Swedish music and sound studio, created it in April as a joke, but its data suggests that people keep it on in the background.

The whole thing is becoming a Kafkaesque nightmare for many!

Here's to hoping that the nightmare will end soon.  Make that nightmares--after all, they are linked!